Fake Blake
Danielle Altman
It’s the nights you least expect it that you end up hooking up. That’s what I told myself as I took a rip off Ashley’s bong in the backseat of her Jetta, blowing smoke out the window as we crept down Melrose. Lauren navigated toward the Troubadour from the passenger seat because I was too high to do it. She’d ruined everything by deciding to come at the last minute. I’d just been dumped and needed to find someone less attractive than me to fuck so that I could feel better about myself. A Jets to Brazil show was the perfect opportunity to hook up with a random guy in too-tight pants and Buddy Holly glasses. At least, until Lauren showed up. She hoovered guys.
“You didn’t even try, Danielle.” She twisted around to grimace at my outfit. I wore flares, dirty Converse, and a UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs sweatshirt.
“It’s indie rock.” I gestured for the Big Gulp of Captain Morgan’s and Coke she’d been hogging. “It’s all about not trying.”
Ashley scrunched her button nose at me in the rearview mirror, reluctantly agreeing, even though she’s worn a slutty red dress with thigh highs and platforms. “You know what I’m going to do tonight?” Lauren asked as she swept her swoopy bangs aside and tongued her straw. “I’m going to fuck Blake Schwarzenbach.” Ashley and I laughed. Frontman for Jets to Brazil, former frontman of Jawbreaker. Lauren regularly pulled drummers and bass players, but not lead singers. Especially not legendary ones. But who knew? I would have fucked her hyperactive little body myself, but it was 2000, and I couldn’t have admitted that to anyone. People weren’t as open then.
“Are you sure you want to?” I asked Lauren. “I heard he’s doing a lot of stuff live. Singing, keyboards, guitars. That all sounds exhausting. Wouldn’t you rather be with someone less physically depleted?”
She frowned. “But he writes the best love songs. I want to be a girl in one of his songs.”
“Have you read those lyric sheets?” I stared out the window at one of those ivy- covered restaurants that only does valet and has no visible name. “A lot of it’s about other stuff. Boats. Masturbation. Depression. Trains. San Francisco. Break ups. Suicide by curtain rod.”
“If you fuck him, we owe you Del Taco.” Ashley nodded and smiled at me in the rearview mirror, roping me into potentially paying my friend for having sex even though she knew I was broke. “And if I hook up with a guy from The Promise Ring, you guys owe me Del Taco.”
“Don’t you think that’s objectifying?” I said to the bong between my knees. “It’s weird how you collect guys in bands. You’re like serial killers collecting trophies.”
“Jesus, don’t take everything so seriously,” Lauren said. “Santa Cruz has changed you. What are you, like a gender studies major now?”
“I am taking gender studies classes. Feminism works both ways. If we want guys to treat us better, we can’t treat them like objects either.”
They ignored me. We got stuck in traffic beneath the Apple billboard of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. What kind of company uses a dead guy to sell computers? I wasn’t sure if I actually felt bad about objectifying guys, even though all the French theorists suggested I was supposed to.
I sighed and leaned back against the leather seat. Lauren and I were both snarky brunettes, but she was the hotter one. I had no game when she was around.
* * *
Inside the stinky old boot that was the Troubadour, a band I’d never heard of who sounded like every other Jade Tree band opened, and then The Promise Ring went on, a band I refused to take seriously based on their name. After their set, Lauren disappeared to find a spot near the stage and Ashley went to the bar to troll guys for free drinks. I stayed where I was. In the middle-middle. All the bands I loved had downshifted into indie rock, but part of me hoped some middle schoolers would sneak in and start a pit.
“Hey,” a guy near me said. Hüsker Dü t-shirt with pit stains. Check. White leather belt with studs. Check. Pot belly. No. Shocked and grateful when he got to fuck me later? Yes.
“Hey,” I said.
He pointed at my sweatshirt. “Pulp Fiction fan?”
“Uh, sure. I go to school at Santa Cruz. But yeah, also a Pulp Fiction fan.”
He offered me his joint. Check. “Are you here for Jets to Brazil?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I took a lusty drag. “You?”
“Yeah.” Check. “I mean, Jawbreaker was better. But if I can’t see them, I might as well see Jets.”
“You’re comparing apples and oranges.”
“I prefer post-hardcore.”
“It’s unreasonable to expect a hardcore band to maintain it for very long. Anything gets old after a while. I mean, take Hüsker Dü. They had like one hardcore record. Even Black Flag slowed it down after a couple of years.”
He eyed his joint. “I just find this emo shit kind of gay.”
“Oh yeah? What makes it ‘gay’ exactly?”
He pointed to the stage. “Keyboards, for one. I mean, come on. Blake Schwarzenbach playing keyboards?”
“If it’s so gay, then why did you buy tickets?” I asked.
“Geez. Sorry if I offended you. What are you a keyboard player or something? Wait, let me guess. You have a zine.”
“Bands change. People change. Seems pretty narrow-minded of you to try to put people in small boxes and trap them there. It’s not very punk rock of you.”
He gasped. “Give me my joint back.”
“No.” I started walking away with his joint in my hand.
“Bitch,” he said loudly, at my back. I spun around. Some guys looked at him like he was an asshole, not only because I was a girl I don’t think, but because I looked twelve when I wore a sweatshirt and no makeup. They all probably worried I was there with my dad. I flipped the Hüsker Dü guy off. I almost didn’t think of a comeback, but then I did.
“You want to know who’s for real gay, out and proud?” I said, pointing at his shirt. “Bob Mould, from Hüsker Dü.” I found Ashley at the bar and pulled her away from a group of guys checking out her boobs.
“Remember when we would go to shows in high school and see how many guys we could get to call us bitches? A guy over there just called me a bitch, and I wasn’t even trying that hard!” I said this like it was a huge win. I said it like I had just fucked Black Schwarzenbach.
Ashley high-fived me. “I owe you Del Taco,” she said.
“What are you guys talking about?” I inserted myself into the group of guys she’d been talking with. They were debating something passionately.
“Blake Schwarzenbach,” a guy in a Jawbreaker t-shirt said.
“Why?” I asked.
“We’re talking whether he’s a sell-out or not.”
That’s when the paranoia kicked in. Joints stacked on bong rips. Why would everyone not shut the fuck the up about Blake Schwarzenbach? I backed away slowly, holding a fresh beer Ashley had handed me. I said I had to go to the bathroom even though I didn’t. I found a dark corner and backed myself into it. Black creek. That’s what Schwarzenbach meant in German.
Jets to Brazil set up. The person that everyone wouldn’t stop talking about eventually came out and took a seat at the keyboards. I felt sorry for him. Everyone wanted him to be someone he wasn’t anymore. To freeze him in time. Why was everyone so afraid of him changing?
Because of the crowd, and how short I was, I only got distant flashes of his face. To me, he was disembodied legs and sneakers getting comfortable with keyboard pedals. I didn’t know keyboards had pedals. I thought of my dad singing along to Randy Newman. Finally, the band started. A dirty twang, minor key melancholy. The vocals were those of a caged bird. Surprisingly nervous.
* * *
A couple of nights later, Lauren and I were at Ashley’s place in Fairfax on a Thursday night, getting ready to go to a mod night at a bar called Café Bleu. Lauren had not fucked Blake Schwarzenbach, and I had not had my rebound.
“What are you wearing tonight?” Ashley asked me.
I was in the outfit I played Grand Theft Auto in—pajamas. I had a bunch of cute dresses I’d brought down from school hanging in her closet, but I hadn’t touched them. “I don’t know.”
“Were you in love with him or something?” Lauren asked me, referencing Trevor, the guy who’d broken up with me at the end of spring term.
“No,” I said. “I got attached to him though. He looked like Billy Idol.”
“Generation X Billy Idol, or “White Wedding” Billy Idol?” she asked.
“White Wedding.”
“Oh, well that’s less of a loss,” Lauren said.
“He had ADD,” Ashley said to Lauren, as if this explained my attachment. It kind of did.
“He was on Ritalin,” I said. “It made him hyper-focused. I’ve never met someone so focused on making me come. It’s hard to say goodbye to that.”
“Like, how hyper-focused?” Lauren asked.
“Hours of focus,” I said.
“You have to remind yourself of the bad things about him,” Lauren said. “What were the bad things?”
“He couldn’t function without weed. The only thing he had in his fridge was tortillas and tofu. The Ritalin stole his appetite, so he never wanted to go out to eat. His roommates wrote my name next to girls who looked like me in Barely Legal. He shared a Barely Legal subscription with his roommates, and they stacked them in the living room like they were newspapers. He didn’t read books. Didn’t own any. He was in love with his best friend, this girl who looked like Edie Sedgwick. Once—“
“I’ve heard enough,” Lauren said. “He sounds awful.”
“We need to get you back out there,” Ashley said.
“Yes,” said Lauren. “It’s time for an intervention.”
An hour later, I was in black sparkle everything. Black sparkle tights, black sparkle mini-dress, black sparkle eye shadow. Cat-eye eyeliner out to forever, meow. A headband. Mac Lip Glass. Lauren humped my leg in front of Ashley’s closet door.
“You look like Francoise Hardy,” Lauren said. I had no idea who that was, but I said thanks. I looked her up later. A pretty French new wave actress. A lesser Jane Birkin.
* * *
At Café Bleu, we hopped over the red velvet rope. The bouncer watched us do it and looked away. The cover was only 5 bucks. He knew we were underage. We passed Rodney Bingenheimer whispering to Chloe Sevigny.
“I’m going to fuck Chloe Sevigny,” I whispered to Lauren.
“I thought you didn’t objectify people,” Lauren said.
“I’d objectify her,” I said.
“Hey,” Ashley said to me. “I think that guy at the bar is checking you out.” That was rarely true. It was something Ashley said that when she found someone she didn’t want to hook up with herself.
“Oh my god,” Lauren said. “It’s Blake Schwarzenbach.”
The guy was checking me out. Tallish, dark wavy hair. Great bone structure, sullen smile. The smudged eyes of an insomniac depressive. I’d never seen him there before and we knew everyone there.
“How do you know what he looks like?” I asked Lauren. I didn’t remember any band photos from CD inserts. Just a cat photo, a mule caught in headlights, a topless Easter Bunny with great tits. The girls dragged me over.
“We wanted to say hi,” Lauren said.
“Okay,” the guy said, his eyes on me.
“What’s your name?” Ashley asked him, after giving him our names.
“Blake,” he said.
Lauren took an intake of breath. Ashley mewed. The sounds the girls made before they shoved me away to fight over a boy.
“Not to be annoying,” said Lauren. “But are you in a band?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking surprised.
“I thought so,” she said. “What do you play?”
“Lately, keyboards,” he said. “What do you all do?”
Lauren squeezed his arm. “I love keyboards.”
Ashley toyed with the hem of her skirt.
“Gender studies,” I announced, even though I hadn’t officially changed my major yet. “And what do you do aside from music, Blake?” I always acted like my mom when I got nervous, asking too many polite questions in a senatorial voice.
“I study poetry,” he said. Lauren looked like she was about to faint.
“If you’re doing gender studies, you’re probably reading a lot of critical theory?” Blake asked me.
“Yes, I am,” I said, in the same tone Hilary Clinton used when she was defending her choice to stay with Bill after the affair.
“Who’s your favorite theorist?” he asked.
Lauren began to vibrate, likely from shock at being ignored. Ashley cocked her head in full-on blonde confusion.
“Currently, a tie between Judith Butler and Foucault,” I said.
He looked at me like he wanted to melt me in fire and lick the lava of my hot wet body off the floor.
Lauren stopped trembling and Ashley stopped tilting. I’d had black eyeliner, headbands, and miniskirts work on guys before, but never my brain. I panicked.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. The club was so tiny that I had to go into the bathroom to avoid looking like I was avoiding him. I didn’t want Blake Schwarzenbach to think I was rude.
As I pushed open the door to the dim bathroom, I locked eyes with Chloe Sevigny’s reflection in the mirror. She was rubbing Chanel lip gloss into her lips, over and over again. Even though she was clearly rolling, she maintained that look that said, I know you know who I am but just be cool and don’t say a word about it.
I looked down at my ballet flats. I might have grown up in Rancho Cucamonga, but I knew well enough to not violate the LA code of leaving celebrities alone.
Someone was getting loudly fucked from behind in one bathroom stall. A girl who seemed to be Chloe’s friend leaned against the other stall. Smoking. One ankle boot casually crossed behind the other. One curvy hip jutting out. One suckable bottom lip. She took a step toward me, then another, her blank dark eyes floating in her flushed face.
She stumble-hugged me, I caught her, she giggled and righted herself. She ran her hands down my arms, looking at me like a little dolly she wanted to undress. I untethered from the world. I became a heartbeat between the legs. Chloe watched silently. I inhaled smoke, vanilla perfume. I looked down the girl’s shirt, which looked as though it had been unbuttoned and balled up on the floor a few times already that night. Pale pink bra, pale pink nipples. Something piggy about her, in a sexy way. Her short leather skirt was Marc Jacobs. The label was sticking out. If I put my hand up her skirt, I would probably get away with it.
The girl stuck her cigarette between my lips and walked out. Chloe followed her.
I slumped against the back of the stall where the girl had been, taking deep breaths to steady myself, the stall shaking from the rhythm of the couple fucking. The train had left the station without me. I was a boat, unmoored and lonely floating. Smoke seeped from my mouth like San Francisco fog. Lauren was right. They were love songs after all.
I came out of the bathroom. Blake was waiting for me. I knew I was attracted to him then, or at least immensely horny, because I found his stalkerish behavior charming instead of creepy. Also, he had the casual grace of a performer, leaning against a red wall, smoking dramatically with one hand and rubbing his eyes like he was tired with the other. Black t-shirt, black jeans, Chelsea boots. I was grateful for Lauren and Ashley then. They had dressed me up like Francoise Hardy and now my life was a French new wave movie. Unless I had it all wrong. I grew leaden. I remembered the people I’d left in the bathroom. Boys and girls shared the bathroom at Café Bleu.
“Are you waiting for the bathroom?”
“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”
A champagne cork popped inside of me. “That’s nice of you,” I said. “Also, it’s a bad time for the bathroom because there are two people in there loudly fucking.”
He threaded his fingers between mine. What a pleasant tingle. “Do you want some poppers?”
“They don’t serve food here,” I said.
“I mean—” he placed a finger against one nostril and sniffed with the other. “But if you’re hungry for jalapeno peppers, there’s like three Denny’s around here.”
I put it together. Poppers. Foucault. Ignoring my hot friends. He wasn’t into girls, and he most definitely wasn’t Blake Schwarzenbach. Based on that dude’s music, he seemed gritty. Heterosexual to a suicidal fault.
But I was never one to turn down free drugs.
He pulled a tiny brown bottle out of his pocket. It felt a little rapey, but I was surrounded by about 75 people that knew me. I told him I hadn’t done it before, and he explained that I should take a little sniff, that it wouldn’t last long.
“So, it’s like cocaine,” I said.
He grinned.
It was like cocaine. Liquid body cocaine. Instead of revving my brain up and making me a motormouth, the poppers made me feel like my body was covered in a thousand clits.
He grabbed me around the waist. We danced. For once, I had no inhibitions. Even though the DJ was spinning Pulp, the Faces, Ride, my pelvis was pure Elvis. Arms flying. Blake’s tongue pushed against mine, his tongue tracing my clavicles. Bi, I guessed? We were slick, golden, numb. I understood why people took poppers to do butt stuff.
I took more. Boing boing boing, dancing with my eyes closed. Now and then I would open them and get flashes of the scene. Chloe lying on her back on a cocktail table, her friend not in sight sadly. More poppers. Kissing. Rodney ignoring everyone, looking bored. My arms flailing in front of me. More kissing. More poppers. No one cared. It was liberating.
Eventually, Blake asked if I wanted to go to his car. I made sure to tell five friends where I was going, including this guy Rick, who was the designated driver for a group of people so large I couldn’t imagine what kind of vehicle they had arrived in.
“What did you drive here, a bus?” I asked Rick.
“Did you do too many poppers?” He asked.
I kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going to Blake Schwarzenbach’s Bronco. It’s parked off Sweetzer. If I’m not back by 2, send someone for me.”
The night air was cool. We half-ran, holding hands. Hollywood in microcosm. The reek of pot, stale cigarettes, old piss. Streetlights raining yellow dew drops in air beaded with tomorrow’s June gloom. Hookers. Empty Carl’s Jr. burger wrappers. Was I hungry? Weird puddles of liquid that made you hopscotch like a kid to avoid them. Gutter trickling. Dark as a black creek.
Sweetzer was empty, quiet. When Blake put his key in the back of the Bronco, I thought of OJ. The LA Strangler. I didn’t want to be anybody’s victim. Then I saw his gear, through the back window. Two guitar cases. Multiple amps and cords. Some pedals. A keyboard in its case. Holy shit. Had Lauren been right along?
This was it. I could finally one-up her. Then I noticed the California plates. Not the old blue ones, but the new ones that were white with California in yellow cursive. I was pretty sure Jets to Brazil wasn’t a California-based band. If they were, they would have played LA more.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Reseda.”
The real Blake Schwarzenbach definitely didn’t live in Reseda.
“Do you have roommates?” I asked, even though I knew this was unlikely. No one under thirty chose to live in Reseda.
“I live with my parents.” He had moved enough stuff around in the back so that we had a place to sit. He pulled me into his lap and ran his hand up my thigh, probably to distract me from the fact that he lived with his parents.
Even if he wasn’t Blake Schwarzenbach, he did have all that gear. There was a chance he played keyboards in a cool band.
“What’s the name of your band?” I asked.
“The Silver Stone Ponies,” he said.
I twisted around and coughed to hide my laughter. He removed his hand from between my legs.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just a huge Sylvester Stallone fan. I thought of him when you said that. I’m pretty high, to be honest. Anyway. I think I’ve seen your band. At Spaceland, last winter?”
“Yeah, we open there a lot.” He looked hurt.
“Sorry if I’m acting weird.” I patted his dick, half hard in his pants. “I just broke up with someone.” He offered me a cigarette, and I took it. We smoked for a minute sitting on the back of the car. Even though it was June, it still smelled like jasmine.
“Just to confirm, you’re not Blake Schwarzenbach?”
“Who?” he asked, genuinely confused. That comforted me. That he didn’t know who Blake Schwarzenbach was. In a rush, I decided I liked my fake Blake very much.
We fooled around in the back. At some point, there was a loud banging on the window. Rick’s moon-like face, peering into the back of the Bronco. Me, trying to hide my naked body behind an Orange Crush amp. Ashley and Lauren, drunk and proud as Irish fathers at the birth of a new child.
“Will you do me a favor?” I asked Blake before I cranked a window down to send my friends away.
“Anything.”
“Will you tell those girls out there that you’re Blake Schwarzenbach?”
* * *
The next morning, I woke up in his bed. He had not one but three Geddy Lee posters. Oh God, musicians. To quell my mild panic at being trapped in Reseda with a guy who liked Rush, I focused on his stacks of Second Wave romantic poetry and French theory. When he slipped his finger inside me, I let him. In the living room, his dad cleared his throat. That got me wet.
“What’s your favorite Stallone movie?” Blake asked in a quiet sexy voice.
“It’s a tie between Rocky—the first one—and Over the Top.” The only Stallone movies I could recall. “Do you have a condom?”
He slipped it on. I got on top. I came to an image of the piggy blonde from the bathroom, blouse open, breasts squeezed out of her bra, her black leather skirt lifted for me.
After Blake finished, he rested on his elbow alongside me. “You must be a Stallone fan if you like Over the Top,” he said, in that way guys did when they were impressed by a girl who likes boy things.
I nodded, running my tongue along the sharp edges of my teeth, smiling. There was zero risk in pretending. Blake didn’t know who I’d been before. I could change. I could be anyone.
Danielle’s work has appeared in The Afterpast Review and is forthcoming in Literally Stories. She's working on a novel set in the 1980s Los Angeles punk scene. Danielle always feels weird writing in the third person, so she will end this on a standard geographic note: she lives in the suburbs.