“It’s complicated,” I said. And then I got out of his car and went inside.
Sometimes you just have those days where everything goes wrong. But sometimes, and totally unexpectedly, something can go right.
7
My hands were shaking when I arrived at Char’s home on Sunday afternoon. I had texted him earlier in the day to ask if he was free to teach me about DJing, and he wrote back, SURE! COME OVER @ 3 AND WE’LL MAKE MUSIC :) So he had invited me here, I reminded myself.
But still. That didn’t mean he actually wanted me here. As I rang the buzzer to his apartment building, I imagined him, maybe with a bunch of his friends, hiding behind a parked car, watching me, laughing, and saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she actually showed up. Like she believed I was serious!”
That wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Char answered the door, looking like he had just woken up, but nonetheless happy to see me. “Hello!” he said. “If it isn’t Elise, the precocious DJ.”
I gave him a silent glare. I don’t need to take a bus all the way across town on a weekend for someone to make fun of me. I can do that just by going to school.
I had told my mom that I was spending the afternoon at Sally’s house. I briefly considered telling her that I’d made a new friend and I was going to hang out with him, figuring she would be delighted to hear that my social life was blossoming. Then I decided that, because my new friend was a nearly-twenty-year-old male whom I’d never seen in daylight before, maybe my mom didn’t need to know.
“Did you bring your laptop?” Char asked.
I held it up for him to see.
“Excellent. Let’s do this.”
I followed Char as he bounded up four flights of stairs and then down a short hallway. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a plain red tee with a small rip in the back, and he had a Chicago Cubs baseball cap jammed down over his unruly hair. In this outfit, he still looked like the Char I knew, but he also looked like somebody else. Like he could have been any of the guys at my school—a little older, but no more special. I suddenly understood why Mel kept telling me to “fix up, look sharp.” The everyday Char didn’t wear fitted suits or leather jackets. Maybe the everyday Pippa didn’t wear four-inch heels or sequined dresses either. The everyday me didn’t play music at late-night dance parties. I couldn’t tell which was the way Char actually was: Char at Start, or Char at home.
He unlocked the door to his apartment. Actually, apartment would be a compliment. It was a room. A big room, with a bed at one end and a kitchenette at the other, but still just a room. There were a bunch of boxes stacked up in the middle of the floor, and Char’s DJ setup rested on top of them: a turntable, a mixer, a laptop, and speakers on either side.
Char looked around the room, his lips pursed, like he was seeing it through my eyes. “Right,” he said. “I just moved in, is why there are all these boxes still.”
“Oh, when did you move?” I asked politely.
“October.”
I squinted at him. “You know it’s April, right?”
He shrugged.
I looked around at his unswept floor, unmade bed, and white walls—blank except for that Trainspotting poster about “choose life” and an enormous Smiths poster that said GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA on it.
Then I shrugged, too, set down my computer, and said, “Okay, so teach me something I don’t know.”
He laughed and sat down on his bed. “I’ve never taught anyone to DJ before. I don’t want to sound like your bio teacher.”
“I don’t take bio,” I told him. “I’m in chem now. I’m a sophomore.”
He rolled his eyes. “I guess the thing to know about DJing is that it’s not just playing one song after another song, like you were doing on Thursday. That’s good, and it takes practice to do that using the equipment. But that’s not enough, because, at the end of the day, anyone can put together an iPod playlist and press play, but not just anyone can have my job.
“There are two things that make someone a great DJ. One is technical skills. Not leaving gaps between the songs, not accidentally playing two songs at once, starting songs from the point that you want—that kind of thing. One of the most important things to master is beat matching. Do you know what that is?”
“It’s when you fade in one song while you’re still fading out the other,” I answered, while looking around the room for a place to sit down. Nothing. No chairs, no couches, no rug. The only place to sit was on the bed, next to Char. But the idea of that made my hands feel shaky again. Did he have sex with Pippa here, in this bed?
“Right,” Char said, like he was answering my unspoken question. “If there’s a pause between songs, people will use that as an opportunity to go to the bathroom, or get another drink, or for whatever other reason leave the dance floor. Your goal, as DJ, is to make them stay on the dance floor. So when you match the beats from one song to the next, there’s an overlap, but it sounds harmonious, not cacophonous, and no one even notices that they’re dancing to the next song until they’re already in it. Give it a shot.”
So I hooked up my laptop to Char’s mixer, and he talked me through transitioning from “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to “Young Folks.” But it did not sound, as he had suggested, harmonious. It sounded like a headache.
Char leaned back against his pillows and watched me, a smile playing on his lips.
“Okay, what am I doing wrong?” I asked after the third time that I completely failed to align the two songs.
“It’s just hard,” Char said. “For starters, you’ve picked two songs that happen to be really tricky to beat match. Start with something more straightforward. I learned to do this by transitioning from ‘This Must Be the Place’ into ‘This Must Be the Place.’ It’s easier to figure out how songs match up when they’re the same song.”
So I tried doing that for a while, but still I couldn’t get the beats to hit at the same time.
“I think I’ve ruined this song for myself,” I told Char. “Have I ruined it for you, too? I’m sorry. It used to be so enjoyable.”
“It takes more than ten minutes of repeating the same song for me to grow sick of it,” Char said. “But there are definitely songs that I’ve ruined for myself. Like ‘Girls and Boys.’”
“The Blur song?” I said, resting the headphones around my neck for a moment. “But it’s so good!”
“Ah, that just means you don’t go out enough. I’ve been going out three or four nights a week for the past three years. That means I’ve gone out roughly five hundred times. And every single time, I have heard that song. Now, the word girls appears in that song thirty-two times. That means that I have heard Damon Albarn say the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. What percentage of my life do you think I have spent listening to that song?”
I shrugged. “Math.”
“Algebra?” he asked.
“Geometry. Algebra was last year. I’m a sophomore, Char.” I put the headphones back on and tried again for the “This Must Be the Place” into “This Must Be the Place” transition. No luck.
Char hopped off the bed and came over to stand next to me. He reached across me to press pause on my computer. Then he gently removed the headphones from my head and flipped them so that one side was pressed against his ear and the other was pressed to mine. His head was just a few inches away from my own. “Okay,” he said, and he started the song from the beginning again. Then he took my free hand and pressed it to the turntable. He rocked our hands back and forth on the record so that I could hear the same beat of the song repeat over and over in the headphones. “You hear that?” he asked. “That’s the kick. You want it to match the downbeat on the other song.”