With AMX Gold, you can experience the gold standard. You get access to exceptional dining, plus four times membership rewards points on eligible dining purchases. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms apply, cap applies, learn more at americanexpress.com/with AMX. Life is full of things to manage, your work, your family, your plans, and your treatment. Consider quesinta, ophatuma-mab 20 milligram injection. You can take it yourself from the comfort of home. If you're ready for something different, ask your healthcare provider about quesinta. And check out the details at quesinta.com, brought to you by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation. This episode is brought to you by JIRA. Ever wonder how those big marketing campaigns that make headlines get delivered on time? It all starts with JIRA, the only project management tool you need to plan and track work across any team. Every step of that campaign is organized in one place, from launching the campaign, all the way back to designing ads and writing creative briefs. Get started on your next big marketing campaign idea today, in JIRA. Rock is lit. Rock is lit. Rock is lit. Rock is lit. You're listening to Rock is lit with Christy Halberg. Rock on, Christy. Rock is lit. Hey there, Lit listeners. Welcome to Season 4 of Rock is Lit, the first podcast devoted to rock novels, and also the 2024 American Writing Awards Podcast of the Year in the categories of music and arts. Rock is lit as a proud member of the Pantheon Podcast Network. Hey, I'm John Stewart, and you're listening to the Pantheon Network. Rock is Lit is hosted, executive produced, and edited by me, Christy Alexander Halberg, author of my own rock novel, Searching for Jimmy Page. Big shout out to this season's incredible team, social media intern Keeley Platz, and our three production interns, Major Legullen, Tyler Elcock, and Theo Lair. This season we're shaking things up with a fresh new format. Instead of our usual author interviews, we'll be rolling out a weekly reading series, giving you a deeper dive into the world of rock novels through curated readings and literary explorations. To keep up with all things Rock is lit, follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube at Christy Halberg. For more info, head to ChristyAlexanderHalberg.com. Got a rock novel you'd love to see featured? Drop me a line at ChristyAlexanderHalberg@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. And don't forget, if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe, leave a comment, and give us a five-star rating on your favorite podcast platform. Wyatt, the Rock is Lit mascot, and I thank you for your support. This is Garthress Kalberg, and you're listening to Rock is Lit. I'm Garthress Kalberg. The author of City on Fire, a field guide to the North American family, and as of this past summer, a novel called The Second Coming. That title may look like an allusion to a poem by Yates, which I used as an epigraph. There's also a Walker Percy novel called The Second Coming, and a little Richard album, no one remembers, called The Second Coming. But really what the book's heroine and narrator have most immediately in mind is a line from the 1981 Prince song Sexuality, which became the title to an unfinished album and film project he worked on through the early 1980s. Eventually, Prince's version of The Second Coming mutated into the movie and album we call Purple Rain. Prince's is such an important figure in this book. He becomes important to Jolie, our narrator and protagonist, the year she turns 14. But as the story progresses, the book's interest in music and in unfinishedable projects of all kinds goes even wider. I don't want to spoil the ending, but by the time you get there, you've gone pretty deep into Jolie's personal playlist and record collection, which is built on the remnants of her dad's, which in turn is built on the remnants of his mom's Jolie's grandmother's. There you get some Taylor Swift in there, but also some deep parts from the mid-90s hip hop and hardcore her dad would have been listening to and stuff stretching all the way back. Jolie's grandmother's love for the hoo and the Grateful Dead. Book really centers, though, on the character of Jolie and her dad, his name is Ethan. When it opens in 2011, kind of the hangover years of the Great Recession, Jolie's entering young adulthood in New York City. She's running around the city largely on her own, as what we used to call a latchkey kid, and it is just not working for her. She's lonely for one thing. Prince is sort of her imaginary friend, the person she feels like gets her, and gets the strange things happening to her body and her feelings at 13 and 14. For another thing, Jolie's a little reckless. She's become a secret drinker and likes to think of herself as more grown up than she is when it comes to boys and, for that matter, girls. And maybe she's grieving a little, too, over the loss of her dad, Ethan. We learned that he's a recovering addict and, after a fairly checkered role in her childhood, has gone into rehab in California and largely disappeared from Jolie's life. He's now 33 and still living out in California, ostensibly because of sobriety is too fragile for the turmoil of life back in New York. Jolie is about to reach a breaking point. It happens as an incident in the New York City subway that's either an accident or a cry for help. And when word reaches Ethan, he becomes convinced it's the second of these. That his daughter is headed down a road he knows only too well. And that her mom, who's the sex wife, is in denial. That he alone has to swoop back in Jolie's life and save her before it's too late. Another kind of second coming. And it puts the choice back on Jolie. She has to decide as Ethan, whose self-involvement has historically done no favors, suffering from a messiah complex here. Or is he the only one actually making a breakthrough to the reality of his daughters in her life? Are they going to lock each other out for good or finally find a way to let each other in? One of the things I've tended to get a lot of questions about, starting with City on Fire, is music. That book was a pretty deep dive into New York in the 1970s, and the punk rock of that time did a lot of work for the story. It was a kind of setting for one thing, and a certain energy in the prose too. And maybe it was a kind of politics or metaphysics, something the characters can believe in when other institutions, other paths to transcending the self, have collapsed. What means most to me about the music in City on Fire though, particularly this distance, is the way it lets you into the characters. I've always felt as a writer like, if you can tell me what a character is listening to, I can tell you what they're feeling. And if I can convey that to the reader, along with where the character is and space and time when they're feeling it, it can help take the reader deep inside. Like those friendships you make in your youth that begin based on the fact that someone else loves the same song as you do. It's a point of access, a way of knowing someone. And early on, I very deliberately started thinking this question about Jolie. Music was so important to me at that age. I was having a lot of the experiences she goes through in the book, and I really felt like on a daily basis, music was saving my life. I felt like, you know, the world is totally fucked. I want out. But if I can put on a song that takes me somewhere else, which would have been, at that time, Nirvana, or Bugazi, or pavement, I can get through the next three minutes. So here's Jolie walking around the streets of New York alone, a little drunk at 14, with headphones on, or earbuds in. What is she listening to? Here's a fun "Rock is Lit" fact. For a while, I considered the possibility that it might be Led Zeppelin. But generationally, that felt brawling for a kid born in 1997. It would have put her too much in debt to the 70s, the decade when her parents were born. And Jolie was kind of defiant toward all that. But the day I realized she was listening to Prince, and that the song she was listening to would be this deep cut, bootlegs, stuff from his famous fall. It was just like, bam, there she was. I put Ethan in the same position as I was at a certain point in the book, looking at his daughter and thinking, like, what is her music? Which for me is a way of asking, who is she? What's going on inside her? What is she feeling? And Ethan's realizing at that point that it's taken him way too long to realize that he has no idea what the answers to those questions might be. By then, though, we've come to see Jolie as a bit of a musician herself and as a questing spirit. So it's not just that her music is the Prince she started out with, it's that as with Prince, her music is throwing music itself. All the musics thrown into a blender and mixed together, punk, funk, rock, jazz, classical. Jolie contains multitudes, like everyone, if you listen close enough. I wanted the role of music in this book to say something about the nature of life as a profoundly relational thing. Something you make with and alongside other people, no matter how badly you might want to be a one man or one woman band. I guess the difficulty of accepting that is a lot of the pain and the glory of growing up. I never meant to call you when it's my role. I never meant to call you when it's my role. Chapter 1 All life is suffering. Well, duh, Jolie would remember thinking the one time Roshi Steve ever stooped the bullet point, the noble truths of Buddhism. Her phone, secure in its copy, was more or less a snuff film of the worlds and tangled miseries. Bread lines, forever wars, the beehives gone silent, the coral reefs bleached white. Yet there, at the zendo, to which she'd been sneaking off each Thursday of the spring of her seventh-grade year, wisdom wasn't supposed to come in such pithy little nuggets. So it was only later, toward the end of April, that she would realize this first noble truth had been the through line all along. I don't mean to suggest that it had shown up in quizzes or drills. Only a few other times had she even encountered it as a verbal formulation. Once the monks and pamphlets on a wire rack by the door, once in a piece of supplemental reading, the dhanapata, maybe, or wikipedia. But at a certain point, that afternoon between her escape from sixth period and her stop in a nearby garden to bolt a little liquor, a thing or two had been, shall we say, brought home. And now here she was, late to what would turn out to be her final meditation. Also possibly, let's just get this out in the open, slightly tipsy. Possibly, obviously slightly tipsy. Vodka was undetectable on the breath, people said. But it's not like jolly aspirin. At that point, barely even a teenager could smell her own breath to check. Any more than she could catch the back of her head in a dressing room mirror or hear her own voice absent the walls of her skull. She succeeded in getting her violin case stowed and squatting to remove shoes. But would recall her backpack only when she stood again, whamming it into the little end table behind her, the one with the porcelain alms bowl on top. And as she whipped around to keep the bowl from falling, there it was, suddenly, her own sadness, flashing back at her like neon from every surface. Take the mats, for example, read mats so thin their only conceivable purpose was to emphasize the cushioning they refused to provide. Or take the roshi, nearly as thin in his masochistic sweater. Her mental imagery going into this had been inflected, admittedly, by the statues in Chinese restaurants. Smiling and slightly loose sputas and 70s feasts and love beads, their plump bellies begging to be rubbed. But roshi steve on his best day could muster at most a glower. And then, suffusing everything, was the light from the picture window that ran the basement's far wall. It was like something had been done to the glass back there, or to the courtyard outside, to lend each object within this terrible clarity. The brutal linoleum, her idiot fingers, the kamikaze bowl, which shattered on the floor just as people were starting to look around for the source of the commotion. The usual crowd here was office workers in their 20s, a few fixy dudes with man-buns and frockish shirts mixed in. But the light brought out lines in their faces, rivers she used to call them, running a fountain from the corners of her mother's eyes, mommy, another river. Mindfulness on such faces could look like anything from fatigue to a sort of pinched constipation, but never like actual enlightenment. Still, it was the roshi's gaunt face she would return to later. Could he tell she'd been drinking? Could everyone? In any case, what she saw there, when he finally saw it and used his bamboo thingy to indicate a map, wasn't anger, but it's opposite. Like, those shards at your feet are an illusion, Jolie, and can wait. Your soul cannot. And the suffering you might spend a whole lifetime trying to ride away from? Well, that's just what life is, cupcake. The way of fire is, it's burning. But hold on a sec. Wait, I can already hear you saying. What were you? Sorry. She. Doing at the Kips Bay's endo in the first place. And why, if the life to suffering equivalency was hardly a secret? If most people growing up managed to figure it out for themselves, thank you very much. Why did she keep going there weekly to shove a few more dollars of her bat mitzvah money into the now-defunct bowl? Even all these years later, I can't be sure. One hypothesis involved in many different ways there are of knowing things. Or rather, the different kinds of things corresponding to different kinds of knowledge. Knowing, say, that Juno is the capital of Alaska isn't the same as living there. So maybe for Jolie Aspern in Manhattan in the precarious springtime of 2011, learning to kneel in place for an hour to stretch and ride out her kneecaps to stress signals was an attempt to nudge certain facts from one category to another. Then again, it's possible she was just hardwired for this. Her paternal grandfather, she knew, had been a chaplain in the Navy and then rector of an Episcopal Boy School on Maryland's Eastern Shore. And though mom's own people had been among the non-observant elite of pre-war Vienna, it would be foolish to rule out the possibility of a rabbi in there somewhere. Genetic explanations had a way of begging the question, obviously. But on the other hand, if Jolie, at 13, had a superpower at all, it was the tug she used to feel toward anything even remotely metaphysical. This nudged foreheads flooding the streets at Ash Wednesday. The Sufis, she'd once heard belting out their version of Happy Birthday at a vegetarian restaurant downtown. That filament of Shabbat's string, she'd wasted a whole Sunday in fifth grade, trailing around the upper east side. Not quite trusting mom's assurance that it was a closed loop. For her, the things of the spirit had a taste, almost. The way the air in a Catholic church had a taste, even though you weren't eating it. Some stone cool and incensed unreason at the heart of the late capitalist world. Jolie loved to this faintly churchy phrase, late capitalism, which she'd come across on one of mom's syllabi, and repeated any chance she got. So maybe the deeper mystery was why she hadn't chosen a more proximate place to stage her rebellion. The nearest synagogue or cathedral or mosque. But here, too, there were strings. And they would seem, when she followed them, to recede into the dreariness of the previous fall and winter. See, that was also the year she'd been transferred to a new middle school. Not one of the out-of-zone catchments to which the rest of her elementary's white population fled a year earlier, but an honest-to-god prep school way down at the foot of Third Avenue. Her mother's political commitments should have put them squarely on the side of public education, but mom had lately seemed more and more resigned to slippages between theory and practice. Or anyway, I glanced at Jolie one morning near the end of sixth grade, had spooked her into submission. "What's that on your face?" she'd said. "Is that Vaseline?" "It's protective," Jolie heard herself say. "Some girls have nails." "Honey, what are you telling me?" "Are you saying people have been fighting at school?" "What do you want me to do, mom?" "The minute they tag you as a brain, you're done for." The burst of candor had an unintended effect. Mom would spend a good chunk of the following summer as a kitchen table. Her son's street head bent over financial aid packages and average test scores, and when school started up again in September, Jolie wasn't walking with few blocks to PS 166 anymore, but heading to the subway for the half-hour trek to Broad Horizons Academy. Progressive education, raw. She would carefully slick a sticker that first day onto the pebbled skin of her instrument case. This machine kills fascists. A conversation starter from the blue stockings bookstore on Allen Street. The school's clicks had formed long ago and worse than being singled out. She drifted through the halls between periods, like just another ghost. Back home, she drew her room's blinds and lay prone on the bed in her underwear, smelling the brick dust kicked out by the second hand window unit. Not that she had any right to feel sorry for herself. She wasn't a civilian in Mosul, she knew. Or one of those Mediterranean boat people just starting to haunt her newsfeed. She was young, white, reasonably privileged. But the whole afternoon, the whole life really, ahead of her. But maybe this was the problem. All those years already in the rear view, all those hours, weeks, months spent in Empire's soft prison, had in the end boiled down to nothing. At some point, she opened her iTunes. The Bach and Shostakovich pieces that had lit her up at seven or eight. Now seemed distant, historical, as if produced on toy instruments under a bell jar. But beneath her bed was a box of old CDs she'd long been avoiding. Now she dragged it out, plucked free, a burned disc that had caught her eye once before. "Other people, a requiem," said the label. But when she put it in, the music, for some reason, wouldn't play. So she reached for another jewel case, Prince. The cover, though, featured not the purple authority of legend, but a cropped blur, loitering by a pile of junk in a turtleneck and big glasses, looking like nothing so much as that coffee talk lady from Saturday Night Live. The music was at first equally off-kilter, a looped drum and a cheese ball synth locked in combat, with what could have been either a heart monitor or a dial-up modem. If you hung around for a minute, and again, jewelry had nothing better to do, it was like you got sucked through a veil into a rich velvet space of guitar and organ, plus whatever was the opposite of falsetto, a tenor beamed back from the far side of apocalypse, recounting the addictions and afflictions and other health you had to struggle through to get there. Halfway through the song, she pressed repeat. She would wake to find the white murky and a note on the nightstand. You seemed exhausted last night, sweetie, so I decided to let you sleep straight through. Had to go meet students, but laid out some breakfast. Don't forget to floss. And indeed, in the kitchen, two packets of instant oatmeal had been left on the counter, along with an ugly banana and mom's friend of me at the New York Times. What would seem telling in hindsight was the weird moment when, waiting for her gums to stop bleeding in the mirror, Jolie imagined the shower curtain being tugged back to reveal her own slumped corpse in the tub. But at the time, it was only a moment. After eating what she could and squirreling away the rest of the bottom of the trash, she should hold her pack and headed to the train alone. And this would become a routine in the weeks that followed. Shuffle through the stations of her classes, avoid all common areas, spend the better part of the afternoon, laboring through the bleary underworld's swim practice, and then to the commute in reverse, a caustic chlorine scent in her nose. Showering seemed beside the point when you could go the whole day speaking only a few dozen words to actual human beings. The latch-key time in her room, working her way through the music collection of a grandmother she'd never got to meet, was the one thing she now looked forward to, the one thing authentically hers. But there are certain kinds of balm that only worsen the underlying injury. And as the leaves continued to scab from the trees outside and the little upload wheel to spin, she could feel a black spot blooming at the center of her head's darkness, like a stain across a microscope slide. Or like someone out there had trained the sun on her through a series of lenses. Like some black-white, queer-straight imp of the perverse, had produced, arranged, composed, and performed this sign of the times for her alone. Then it was February, the last day before mid-term break, and her school was holding another dance. The fall mixer, three months prior, must not have been a total wash because this time some of the girls in her class did get asked by boys. Yet, if you'd happened to peer at 8 that night through the square windows of the gym-torium doors, you'd have seen the sexes stuck to discrete walls, as if parted by a cone. You might even, if you were a feminist, felt a certain vindication. On the sojourner truth to Paris Hilton's continuum of feminism, Jolie graded herself somewhere around a Beyonce, alert to the workings of patriarchy, yet unable to get fully outside them, which was practically the only bay-like thing about her, what was the acne, the eyebrows. Still, she wanted to believe it was a sign of progress, rather than of surrender, that she'd agreed to meet up beforehand with a girl named Precious Easy Obi. Precious was a year further along in school and a head taller. Not to mention, preternaturally poised was one of those voices that made you realize acting was 80% voice. In the fall production of Into the Woods, while Jolie dutifully sawed away in the orchestra, Precious had played the baker's clever wife. It had been hard to tell from the pit whether her high-waisted apron had done more to hide her curves or call attention to them. But probably hide them, it seemed, for Precious had now swept back in from off-campus in a tight black-and-white wrap dress, and her hair done up in a dozen mini Afro puffs. And the one thing Jolie could do to prevent a sense of gawking was to push into the gym, which is to say the auditorium with no show running. The stage lights at the far end bore colored gels, she noticed, and in place of the fluorescence overhead, Christmas lights snaked through the winched-up basketball goals. Seeing Precious take a soda cup from a table and go lean against the lip of the stage, Jolie did the same. Between speaker's opposite, a laptop had been loaded with the kids' requests, Rihanna, Diplo, Wheezy, or possibly it was just Pandora working subtle variations on the theme of mononymous pop. Five or six songs drifted past like this, then, as if it's some invisible signal, a cluster of girls from the wall crossed to a cleared space near the jump circle. They started shifting back and forth without looking at the boys, yet with a listlessness that seemed directed at them somehow. Was this what Jolie was supposed to do, too? She couldn't unsee the image of chickens from a certain movie from her childhood, stop-motion hens, scratching, and stupidly pecking. Yet saying so out loud, wasn't going to make her feel any happier, only meaner. And when Precious, after a few minutes' thoughtful watching, got up and moved toward an exit, Jolie hoped they'd fulfilled the minimum required attendance and could bounce out of here altogether. The plan was for Precious to spend the night at the apartment where Jolie lived with her mom up town. There was track work and perpetuity on the sea train, and Cabs to Brooklyn could be a pain in the ass, even to the gentrified parts where families like the easy-obies had got renovated brown stands. It was this sleepover element, in fact, that it sold Jolie on the dance. But Precious was now tacking around the corner with seldom-used faculty bathroom. She scanned the hall, put her ear to the door. Then, with a regal jerk of her head, she beckoned Jolie inside. Far from the little Versailles, you might imagine, it was a glorified student John, the same smell of bleach and brown paper towel. The only perk was a deadbolt set high in the door. "Tell me if that still works," Precious said, meaning the transom window above the lone stall. "Okay, but, dude, what are you doing?" But Precious was doing, was sheeding the bolt, dumping her coke into the sink, then running the faucet to rinse the cup. Her overnight bag dumped to the counter. From its depths, came a square-ish bottle Jolie failed to register much of, save for some woodland creature and, full of front, the label. Perhaps she was distracted by all that liquid inside, throbbing faintly with the base through the foot thick wall. "My sister left a stash in her room which she took off for Barcelona," Precious explained. "The middle one I was telling you about, Grace." As always, the mention of Precious's sister brought a tiny, jealous pain. "You stole it?" Stole with such an ugly word. Anyway, I had a hunch we might need to liven things up. As the tempo shifted, Precious measured out a practice draft and knocked it back, thought visibly flinching. Then she refilled the chalice and held it out. Jolie sniffed. She'd never had anything stronger than Man of Shovets, unless you counted the chin. She had let her dip a finger in that one time. She'd been warned since of various hereditary risk factors, but again, wasn't that a cop-out? It's not like one measly drink could ever change anything. Or at any rate, close quarters hang with the most interesting girl in eighth grade hardly seem to place her scruples. She took a demo sip, trying not to breathe through her nose, and swallowed as quickly as if it were her own spit. The result was controlled fire, survivable burn. The second time the cup came to her, though, Jolie miscalculated, so that a whole hot finger of whatever it was was now making the slow transit of her throat. She thought of a pet scan she'd had to undergo once to check kidney function. Contrast die, lighting up her gag reflex. Then the booze touched some deeper opening. The rupture she'd been doing her best to rise above. And, oh, she realized. Oh. As a city girl, born and raised, Jolie liked to fancy herself sophisticated, but her cheek, when next she touched it, had a gauze equality. The air held either more or less oxygen than normal. Precious said something funny, and she heard herself do this horsey-sputtering thing. A pescued pack of American spirits appeared on the counter, and for once she had to give props to the fellow power of DNA. Or even a bag of angel dust to be produced, she saw. She would immediately have tried to snort it or smoke it, because what did nasal passages matter? What did kidneys or lungs, or for that matter, heart, when the disease was life itself? But now the bolt rattled me her ear, followed by a knock. A voice came from outside. Male. Teacherly. "Hello?" "Shit," Jolie would remember thinking. Just as Precious said, "Shit." And louder. And the same register she'd used to tell off her baker husband. "Es acupados, senor!" Then she slipped down off her wedges, climbed nimbly atop the commode, shoved the bottle with its fire remnant through the transom. Jolie braced for the sound of breaking, but Precious must have pre-positioned a receptacle on the street below, or, anyway, you wouldn't have put it past her. "If somebody asks," she hissed, "you've got your period, and the dispenser and the girl's room is out." "But what are you doing here in this scenario?" "I'm your moral support, da!" And before Jolie could wonder why it had to be her period. "Is he gone yet?" Jolie put near to the door, unsure how a person was supposed to detect signs of life over all this echoey percussion. But when she slotted the bolt back and peeked out into the hall, there was just an old couch and some half-spooled volleyball nets. And a red stripe spanning the cinderblock wall. It stenciled exhortation. "Eagles!" What came next, she would experience less, as a seamless tracking shot, than as a series of stills stuttering forward at the brush of some cosmic thumb. Yet the overall impression was of the darkness starting, finally, to wane. Like, here was the sheen of sweat that precious his neck, where the hair had pulled it tight. And here they were, dancing. Here was a chubby girl whose prettiness she'd never noticed before, gliding closer and pumping a fist to Jay-Z. Here, at the start of a tribute spin of Billie Jean, were dud clouds of dry ice, courtesy of the physics club. And here was an Asian boy, affecting an uncanny moonwalk. Another boy whipped out a phone to memorialize the memorial, while the fat girl whooped was a knowingness that couldn't quite hide her genuine delight. The DJ/algorithm must have decided to bypass any slow dance, though, because it tenshed sharp amid the audible chalk of levers being thrown, a blue light kindled in the overhead cages, and teachers too clueless to avoid chaperone duty were shouting idle threats about getting locked in over the break. Cool air gusted from doors that led to the street, where the faces of the older parents, glowing, gathered. A few big-ass cans of Arizona iced tea walled on the floor. Julie's own mom's omniscience no longer seemed to extend to public transit, or really to anything below about 110th street, so she and Precious would set out to the subway unobserved. They didn't actually stagger, she didn't think, but she would later retain an inordinate amount of sidewalk in the B-roll, a fatal dazzle of mica under the street lights, unless this was just the glitter in the moonwalking boy's hair. "I think he's into you," Precious said. Julie wondered for brain had gone audible. "What? Who?" Peter Yang, with that whole thriller routine, Precious was just unpacking the finer points of the crotch grab, one hand touched Julie's arm. "Hey, you two want to slow down for a minute?" Julie felt Precious trying to pull ahead, but her own reflex in the face of beseechment was still a shameful obedience. She turned to see a leather jacket, then ahead of floppy blue-black hair, a few inches below where she expected it to be. It was Mr. Kustiglu, who taught exploring cultural richness, and recently taken over the literary magazine. "You ladies looked like you were having a good time back there," he said, eyeing Precious through his architectural glasses. "Oh, you know." "It's better, Julie. I don't know." It was fine. Mr. Kustiglu was one of the younger members of the faculty, and they thus far have been on good terms. In the fall, he'd let her linger in his classroom well into the lunch hour, perusing the ethnologic brickabrack, the long shelves of academic paperbacks that were called "Mom's Study at Home." The rumor was that he dropped out of grad school wearing a bad breakup before coming to teach, hence the faint, hipsterish air. Like his necktie was a prop he couldn't quite get behind. But now he was really inhabiting the role. I saw you out on the dance floor. It looked like a lot more than I don't know. "What's your point, Mr. K?" Precious had a way of making nonchalance seem almost flirtatious, her face tightened as he went on. "I know that was the two of you in the faculty restroom. I assume you have an explanation." "It's kind of a personal question, no. I've for you to be dogging me if this late in the game." "He wasn't dogging anyone," he said. "In fact, I've been trying to stay out of your way, Precious, but when I go to take the recycling out and find this on the dumpster lid beneath the window, he pulled something from his jacket. A late rain was falling, adding to the general mistiness, the mingled clouds of their breath. But Jolie didn't have to look too closely to see the defiant stag logo, dragging everything behind it into clarity. And naturally, a merchant across the street would choose exactly that moment to start cranking the security grate down over his storefront, half a minute of graveyard rattle. More excruciating still was the silence that followed, or what, on the northern fringes of Manhattan's East Village on a Friday night and winter, passed for silence, ambulances screaming their heads off, housing insecure pigeons winging darkly overhead. "It's mine," Jolie blirted. Precious has nothing to do with it. She waited for her new friend to jump in with some matching feet of nobility, and the precious just said, "Everybody knows you have it in for me, Mr. K, but I'm not in your class anymore. We're not on campus, so unless you're ready to bring a proper accusation, or top notes of litigiousness, we're pretty much unmissable. My date night will be going. Let's book, Jolie." The clomp of Precious's wedges on the sidewalk had a bracing authority, but Jolie couldn't get her own feet to budge. She seemed to catch a flicker inside Mr. Costa Glue, as he turned the bottle in his hand, a disappointment, out of all proportion to the offense. Like he'd glimpsed whatever she had, the hole at the back of the universe, and still couldn't get past it. "This is yours," he said, and when she didn't answer, "I'm surprised at you, frankly, Jolie." Drinking on school property is a serious violation of the honor code. Though right now it's your safety I'm more concerned about. How were you proposing to get home? It was just a couple of swallows, Mr. Costa Glue, to see how it felt. And I told you, Precious is sober, you saw her. It trains right there. "You know I'm going to have to contact your parents nonetheless," he said. "My mom lets unknown numbers go to voicemail." So we used your phone to call her. It died. Which was true, actually. She held it up and emailed in. Let's see what comes back. The lit face of his phone lit his own fine face. She watched him thumb type the letters of an address. She felt helpless, with hold. Then he stopped and frowned. "Jolie, this isn't going to end up in some dead account. Is it like a fake number, someone gives out at a bar?" She was used to people in official positions, wondering why her last name failed to match her mom's. Even under birth certificate, she was the only aspirin. "You got me, Mr. Kay. I'm a total criminal mastermind, and this is all just a really long cut." Because it's easy enough to go back to the office and pull your mother's contact card. And let's cut the sarcasm, shall we, given the circumstances? The university emails the one synced her phone. It's Kupferberg, because she never took my dad's name, okay? I was for the first time he got arrested. And then, like, ten, when they made him go to rehab. His eyes seemed to swim slightly behind their lenses, unless it was the booze, making her see-thing. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't realize." "Why would you?" "I could try him instead, if that's who you'd prefer picking you up." The assumption that her father would now be anywhere reachable was telling, she thought. Maybe even a resource to exploit. Not that mom was one for a traditional discipline, but the breach of privacy that had opened up this intriguing closeness with her teacher was going to be unbearable from the woman with whom she already shared meals, a hair color, an apartment, and a habit of biting the ring finger of her right hand when nervous. Then again, the goal seemed to be someone capable of coming down here and retrieving her, as in, corporately. Plus, trying to escape your mother was like trying to escape your own body. Or so, in his many words, she was about to tell Mr. Kazigulu. She was a big girl, and would face the music. When that glimmer, closer to pain than the power, still again, across his face. Look, Mr. Kazig, precious is waiting for me right there at the subway. It's off a block and then, like, six stops on the express. When they go now, and you get the entire break to draft your email, which accomplishes what, exactly. Well, it gives me some time to un-up to my mom myself first. Isn't that the real punishment? Not per the student handbook, I'm guessing. Yeah, but the people who wrote the student handbook, never had to admit human fallibility to Sarah Kupferberg. She said, trying to find the right distance to pooch out her lower lip. In the end, he would insist on putting her into a cab, handing the driver a 20, while she rattled off her cross streets. But at the first red light, after turning the corner, Joey would ask to be let out, and then double back to the subway. She must have sensed already there'd be no one on the platform, save herself and the homeless. But apparently, she wasn't yet ready to abandon that other reality. The one where a girl like Precious Easy Obi would be the type to stick around. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for tuning in, Lit listeners. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and comment on Good Pods and Apple Podcasts, links in the show notes. Wyatt, the Rock Is Lit mascot, and I really appreciate your support. Until next time, keep rockin' and readin' and gettin' lit. Rock is lit. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this first installment of the Rock is Lit Season 4 Reading Series, Garth Risk Hallberg introduces us to his latest novel, ‘The Second Coming’, reading a powerful excerpt and shedding light on the book's evolution. He shares insights into how music, especially the music of Prince, is woven into the narrative and why it plays such a pivotal role.
Set in the spring of 2011, ‘The Second Coming’ follows thirteen-year-old Jolie Aspern, who narrowly escapes a subway accident after trying to retrieve her phone. Her estranged father, Ethan—an ex-convict and recovering addict living in California—learns of the incident and believes something deeper is at play. Convinced that only he can save her, Ethan returns to New York.
The novel explores the fraught journey of father and daughter, both separately and together, from Manhattan during the Great Recession to a beach on Maryland's Eastern Shore. As their paths intertwine, Jolie encounters a mysterious stranger, while Ethan is pulled back into the life of Jolie’s mother—his first love.
Catch Garth on Season 2 EP28 of Rock is Lit, where we discuss his 2015 novel, ‘City on Fire’, which had just been made into an Apple TV+ series: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/rockislitpodcast/garthriskhallberg
MUSIC IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
Rock is Lit theme music
[Guitar Instrumental Beat] Sad Rock [Free Use Music] Punch Deck—“I Can’t Stop”
“Sexuality” by Prince
“Purple Rain” by Prince
“When Doves Cry” by Prince
[Guitar Instrumental Beat] Sad Rock [Free Use Music] Punch Deck—“I Can’t Stop”
Rock is Lit theme music
LINKS:
Leave a rating and comment for Rock is Lit on Goodpods: https://goodpods.com/podcasts/rock-is-lit-212451
Leave a rating and comment for Rock is Lit on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rock-is-lit/id1642987350
Garth Risk Hallberg info: https://www.garthriskhallbergbooks.com/
Christy Alexander Hallberg’s website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/rockislit
Christy Alexander Hallberg on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube: @ChristyHallberg
Rock is Lit on Instagram: @rockislitpodcast
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