He was lucky with his first two clients, a couple of private-equity boys who were into the Chili Peppers and didn’t know Richard Katz from Ludwig van Beethoven. He sawed and nail-gunned on their roofs in relative peace. Not until his third job, begun in February, did he have the misfortune of working for people who thought they knew who he was. The building was on White Street between Church and Broadway, and the client, an independently rich publisher of art books, owned the entire Traumatics oeuvre in vinyl and seemed hurt that Katz didn’t remember seeing his face in various sparse crowds at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, over the years.
“There are so many faces,” Katz said. “I’m bad with faces.”
“That night when Molly fell off the stage, we all had drinks afterward. I still have her bloody napkin somewhere. You don’t remember?”
“Drawing a blank. Sorry.”
“Well, anyway, it’s been great to see you getting some of the recognition you deserve.”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” Katz said. “Let’s talk about your roof instead.”
“Basically, I want you to be creative and bill me,” the client said. “I want to have a deck built by Richard Katz. I can’t imagine you’re going to be doing this for long. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were in business.”
“Some rough idea of square footage and preference in materials would nevertheless be useful.”
“Really anything. Just be creative. It doesn’t even matter.”
“Bear with me, though, and pretend it does,” Katz said. “Because if it really doesn’t matter, I’m not sure I—”
“Cover the roof. OK? Make it vast.” The client seemed annoyed with him. “Lucy wants to have parties up here. That’s one reason we bought this place.”
The client had a son, Zachary, a Stuy High senior and hipster-in-training and apparently something of a guitarist, who came up to the roof after school on Katz’s first day of work and, from a safe distance, as if Katz were a lion on a chain, peppered him with questions calculated to demonstrate his own knowledge of vintage guitars, which Katz considered a particularly tiresome commodity fetish. He said as much, and the kid went away annoyed with him.
On Katz’s second day of work, while he was transporting lumber and Trex boards roofward, Zachary’s mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity. He doubted he could get anywhere with her even if he felt like trying, but he knew that her pride would be hurt if he didn’t make at least a token effort to be disagreeable.
“I know,” he said, propping Trex against a wall. “That’s why it was such a breakthrough for me to produce a record of authentic adult feeling which women, too, could appreciate.”
“What makes you think I liked
“What makes you think I care?” Katz gamely rejoined. He’d been up and down the stairs all morning, but what really exhausted him was having to perform himself.
“I liked it OK,” she said. “It was maybe just a teeny bit overpraised.”
“I’m at a loss to disagree with you,” Katz said.
She went away annoyed with him.
In the eighties and nineties, to avoid undercutting his best selling point as a contractor—the fact that he was making unpopular music deserving of financial support—Katz had been all but required to behave unprofessionally. His bread-and-butter clientele had been Tribeca artists and movie people who’d given him food and sometimes drugs and would have questioned his artistic commitment if he’d shown up for work before midafternoon, refrained from hitting on unavailable females, or finished on schedule and within budget. Now, with Tribeca fully annexed by the financial industry, and with Lucy lingering on her DUX bed all morning, sitting cross-legged in a tank top and sheer bikini underpants while she read the
