You Must Go and Win: Essays by Alina Simone Page A

today?” Sarah would ask on her way to the fridge.
    “A few …”
    “Cool. What ones?”
    “Um. Thistle Heart, Unyielding Crotch, and … um … Shoot the Muffin, I think. There may have been one more.”
    “Oh,” Sarah would say, crinkling her cute nose in confusion. Her clients were on Interscope or Matador, or some other undeniably cool and fashiony label. “I haven’t heard of any of those … but I’m sure they’re all really great! I hope one of them says yes, right?”
    Then she would dash over to the CD player, yelling, “By the way, we just got this in today. It’s an amazing new band from Bristol you’re going to love love love!” and I would grimace as the room grew loud with bright, happy sounds.
    The only way to get internet access in the apartment was to cadge it from the restaurant next door. And the only way to cadge it was by sitting on the very edge of Sarah’s bed, balancing on one quarter of a butt cheek while resting a laptop on a partial slip of window ledge. I often chose to go to the coffee shop down the street instead. The music in the coffee shop was so loud that it was impossible to work, and yet every seat was always reliably full of people working. I would sit there composing sad queries to labels or following up on sad queries to labels. After two weeks of near constant effort, I’d turned up only one possibility, a small label in Acme, Michigan. They asked for a copy of the album, and as I wrote their address on a CD mailer, I wondered whether Acme was a real place. Hadn’t Acme been the name of the company that manufactured the flawed contraptions in those old Road Runner cartoons? The Dehydrated Boulders and Harpoon Guns and Super Leg Vitamins that always reduced Wile E. Coyote to a tiny, smoking turd? Free association wasn’t helping lift my spirits any. Especially now that it was truly winter, and Brooklyn’s
color-saturation knob had been dialed down to zero. One evening as I returned home after another afternoon of fruitless searching, a skinny man with an expensive haircut jogged up to me.
    “Excuse me,” he said. “Would you go out with my drummer?”
    I stared at him. He looked sober.
    “Um,” I said, reshouldering my bag. “No.”
    “We rehearse right there,” he said, pointing to a building on the corner of Roebling, as if the drummer’s sheer proximity might sway me.
    “Uh huh,” I replied tetchily and resumed walking, picking up the pace.
    “Listen. He, like, really, really needs to get laid,” the skinny man continued sotto voce, trotting alongside me.
    “Sorry to hear that.” You, my friend, I thought to myself, are what make people hate Williamsburg.
    “He’s a totally nice guy—”
    “Dude?”
    “—and, to be honest? It’s kind of an emergency .”
    I wheeled around to look him in the eye.
    “I? … am married.”
    I’d said it and now it was very quiet. I had gotten married at twenty-five, an age by which no small number of women already have kids and mortgages as well, but here in Williamsburg, on those blocks populated mainly by rootless twenty somethings, saying “I’m married” was like announcing you were poisonous. It was like saying “I just swallowed a radioactive spider and if you stare at me for one more second, you will die too.” Being married was a secret I’d kept for weeks from the first band I joined in Brooklyn, living in well-justified fear of the inevitable condemnation. A girl singer for a Brooklyn band was not supposed to be married; she was supposed to be cute and available, living a carefree life that involved drinking endless beers without ever gaining weight.
    “Oh my God!” Sarah had whispered when I’d broken the news. “What’s that like, being married?”
    “Well, it’s like … dating someone …” I’d replied slowly, careful not to scare her, “ … only you have to, like, date that same person every day. Forever.”
    The man with the haircut looked at me as though a cockroach had just