He gestured at me to start the other song, and then in my free ear I heard him start to count measures, while in the headphones I heard only the kick of the first song as we kept rocking our hands forward and backward together. “And one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one—”
He pulled my hand off the record, and the two songs took off together, perfectly in sync.
He let go of my hand but didn’t move away. “Now slowly take that slider from one side to the other,” he instructed, and I did. “And that, Elise,” he concluded, turning to face me straight on, “is how to beat match like a DJ.”
Suddenly, “This Must Be the Place” wasn’t ruined for me anymore. Suddenly it was the greatest song I had ever heard.
“You know,” he said, studying me, “you actually have a fantastic smile.”
“Three years of braces,” I explained.
“No, seriously,” he said.
“They also pulled four teeth. Before the braces. That probably helped.”
“Why don’t you smile more often?” he asked.
“I smile about as often as I feel like smiling,” I answered. “Sometimes more, because I read this study that said people like you better when you smile.”
Char laughed. “Does that work? Are people really that easy to trick?”
“In my experience,” I said, “no.”
“Bummer.” He returned to his bed.
“So how’s Pippa?” I asked, switching over to an old Smokey Robinson. The transition sounded messy again, but a little better this time.
Char sighed.
“You know,” I said, “just speaking of people who want people to like them better. It’s a natural transition.”
“No offense, but your transition from ‘This Must Be the Place’ to ‘This Must Be the Place’ worked better.”
“How is Pippa?” I repeated.
“Pippa texted me on Friday with a million apologies and thanks, since Vicky told her that I was the one who carried her home from Start. So that seemed good, because if she could text, then at least we knew that she was alive.”
“And how did you respond?” I asked, scrolling through songs on my computer.
“I didn’t.”
“You just didn’t text her back?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems a little rude, Char.”
He leaned his head against the wall. “I just don’t want to lead her on, you know?”
“So that’s the last that we’ve heard from Pippa?” I asked. “A text acknowledging that she’s alive?”
Char looked shamefaced. “Not exactly.”
I sighed. “What did you do?”
“Well, I ran into Pippa and Vicky at Roosevelt’s last night.” I must have looked blank, because he added, “It’s a bar. They have this amazing monthly soul night. The DJ spins only forty-fives, and his collection is out of this world. Last night he was playing this Lee Dorsey song I’d never even heard before—”
“Pippa,” I reminded him.
“Pippa. Right. I brought her home with me.”
I stopped the song with a screech. “You’re telling me you didn’t want to lead her on, so you brought her home with you?”
He rested the back of his hand against his forehead. “I hear what you’re saying. I don’t know. It made sense at the time.”
“When did she leave here?”
“About an hour ago.”
I looked around Char’s room again, seeing it now with fresh eyes. Pippa was just here.
“Vicky is going to kill you,” I said.
Char gave his pillow a shove. “Vicky is overprotective. It’s not like I’m some pariah, preying on Pippa’s naïveté. She knows how I feel. She wasn’t drunk last night, or at least not as drunk as she usually is. She made her own rational, adult decision to come home with me. She wanted to.”
I thought about Pippa on Thursday, passed out on a bench. “I think Pippa wants a lot of things that aren’t good for her.”
Char shrugged. “Don’t we all?”
I rubbed my thumb across the inside of my left wrist and didn’t reply.
“This is a downer,” Char said abruptly. “I shouldn’t be burdening your young mind with my old-man problems.”
“Once again, if you missed it, I am a sophomore. And furthermore? It’s not like you have to be a legal adult to have problems.”
“Oh, really?” Char laughed. “What are your problems? Chem class is that hard?”
I kept my thumb on my wrist and said nothing.
“Anyway,” Char replied, “you came all the way over here to learn to DJ, not to hear about all the ways that I’ve screwed up with girls.”
“Go on, then.”
“Okay, like I said, there are two things every great DJ needs to be able to do. One is to master the technical skills. Which you’re doing. Good job. Unfortunately, that’s about ten percent of what it takes to DJ right.
“The other part, the part that really matters, is that you need to be able to read a crowd. You can’t just play whatever songs you like. You have to figure out what people are responding to, what they want to dance to, which songs they already know and like and which songs they’re going to like once you have introduced them. Every crowd is different, and even at Start, every week is different. That is why I still play ‘Girls and Boys’ sometimes. It doesn’t matter that I’ve heard Damon Albarn sing the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. As long as people still want to dance to it, it is still worth playing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So how do I do that? How do I figure out what people want?”
“You watch them,” Char said. “You stand in the DJ booth, so you’re near them but not part of them. And whenever you can, you look up from what you’re doing and you see how they’re reacting.”
Char’s words made me think of all the magazines I had read, all the movies I had watched, all the blogs I had studied, trying to figure out what it is that people want me to do. “I don’t think I’m very good at reading the crowd,” I said.
“That’s because it’s an acquired skill,” he said. “It takes practice, sometimes years of practice. And sometimes even the best DJs get it wrong. I think it’s natural to just want to play your favorite songs and force everyone to love them as much as you do. And sometimes, in the right context, they will. Over the past two years, I have turned everyone at Start into a huge fan of this random oldies song called ‘Quarter to Three.’”
“I don’t know it,” I said.
“Exactly. And the kids at Start beg me for it now. But it took a while. Most people don’t immediately like new things. They want to dance to the songs they know. As DJ, you obviously know more songs, and better songs. That’s why it’s your job. But you can’t always be teaching them. Sometimes you have to play along with them. It’s a balance.”
“So you just stand up there and look around the room and figure out what will make people happy?” I asked.
“Pretty much. So, go on. Give it a shot.”
“Okay.” I looked down at my computer, then back up at Char. “Wait, who is my pretend crowd?”
“Me.”
“Oh.” I frowned around his room for a moment, then put on “Born Slippy NUXX.”
“I do like this song,” Char said. “What tipped you off?”
I pointed to the Trainspotting poster taped to his wall.
“Great movie,” he said. “Great sound track. Okay, let me have a turn. Pass me my laptop, will you?”