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Summary
Chapters 2-3
Chapter 2: The Gold Cure
Bennie Salazar, hypochondriac and owner of a record label named Sow’s Ear Records, meets with associates from his company to discuss Stop/Go, a sister act band he signed who aren’t doing well. Bennie pays attention to the conversation at first, but the word “sister” plunges him into a mortifying memory where he kissed a nun. Feeling shaken, Bennie decides to pay Stop/Go a visit after picking up his son Christopher from school. Sasha, his assistant, brings him coffee, and he superstitiously sprinkles in gold flakes to reawaken his libido.
Bennie drives to pick up Christopher. He’s bombarded with more shameful memories, which he scribbles down on the back of a parking ticket. He does this on the advice of his therapist Dr. Beet, so he can avoid passing on his anxieties to his son. He picks up Christopher, and they drive to the house where the Stop/Go sisters Chandra and Louisa live. They find Sasha waiting for them at the door. Stop/Go agrees to a recording session in their home studio. Bennie briefly gets lost in the music, but is repeatedly jolted out of it by shameful, intrusive thoughts. He panics and leaves with Sasha and Christopher.
Bennie drives home with his two companions. On the way, they discuss Stop/Go, who Sasha thinks are awful and outdated. Bennie feels miserable about this, and even worse watching his son walk up the driveway to his ex-wife’s house. Sasha and Bennie ride in silence. At a stoplight, Bennie pulls out his list of insecurities. Sasha reads it aloud, mistaking it for song titles. When they reach Sasha’s apartment Bennie tries to tell her he has feelings for her, but she waves him away.
Chapter 3: Ask Me If I Care
It’s 1979 and Rhea can’t wait for the 70s to be over. She can’t stand the grimy hippies who hang out all over San Francisco. Her story, which is told in the first person, starts with a night when she, Scotty, Bennie, and Jocelyn visit their friend Alice’s house. They’re a group of self-absorbed but idealistic young punks stuck in an awkward tangle of cross-purpose teenage crushes. Rhea mostly hangs out with Bennie, Scotty, and Jocelyn, who spend a lot of time together because Bennie and Scotty are in a punk band called the Flaming Dildos, and the girls write the lyrics. Rhea likes Bennie, but he likes Alice, who likes Scotty. Jocelyn, who loves Scotty, is seeing Lou, a much older record executive. Rhea feels unattractive, especially because of her freckles, and worries that her dyed-green hair doesn’t distract enough attention from them. Rhea makes Jocelyn tell her everything she and Lou do together, including details about their sex life and the drugs they take.
One Saturday the band practices in Scotty’s garage. A pimply college kid called Marty tries out for the band, and Rhea gazes longingly at an oblivious Bennie. Later, after unsuccessfully driving around the city trying to get a gig for the Flaming Dildos, the group heads to The Mab, their local bar and music spot.
One Saturday, Jocelyn goes out with Lou instead of joining them at the Mab. Soon after, Bennie tells them that the Flaming Dildos have scored a gig at the Mab, to everyone’s wild excitement. Before the show, Rhea and Jocelyn meet Lou for dinner at a fancy, touristy restaurant called Vanessi’s. They eat expensive food and snort cocaine, which makes Rhea feel grown up.
At the Flaming Dildos gig, the crowd goes from being indifferent to aggressive in moments. Rhea is sitting next to Lou, his arm around her shoulder, when she looks over and sees that Jocelyn is on her knees giving Lou oral sex. She’s disgusted and frozen, unable to move as Lou climaxes. After the show, they go to Lou’s house. Rhea feels uncomfortable with Lou and angry and resentful of Jocelyn: she also feels angry because everyone has split into couples, leaving her with Marty. She goes outside to get some fresh air. Lou joins Rhea on the balcony, and she realizes that even though she can’t stand him, they’re becoming friends. He tells Rhea to stay true to herself and to learn to love her freckles. Two weeks later, Jocelyn runs away with Lou.
Analysis
Materialism and the physical body are very important in both of these chapters, manifesting in different forms and influencing the characters' actions and perceptions. The desire for material things is also inextricably linked to aging at this early stage in the book. In "The Gold Cure," we learn about Bennie Salazar's obsession with material wealth and success as quickly as we did about Sasha’s kleptomania, Bennie is a record executive with more money than he knows what to do with. However, he’s been struggling with depression and a fading libido, and will try anything to cure it. Recently, he’s been taking pure gold flakes with every cup of coffee in order to combat his sexual impotence. He sees his wealth as being a manifestation of his potency, and knows that he has a reputation for being sexually available and able. He’s deeply ashamed and confused, therefore, that his sex drive seems to have completely disappeared. He blames his ex-wife Stephanie for it, believing that she’s responsible for his apathy and has destroyed his own desire to have sex. Instead of talking about the problem or trying to fix it, Bennie turns to paying for the “medicine” of gold flakes in coffee. At this point in the story, he is spending inordinate amounts of money on these tiny boxes of pure gold shavings. He turns to this quackery both because he can’t communicate, and because he’s terrified of becoming obsolete. This is ironic, as he himself admits that he doesn’t like the new music being produced these days. Bennie's discomfort with aging and his sense of impending doom about his role in the music industry are one and the same: he wants to matter.
Conversely, "Ask Me If I Care" isn’t nearly as gold-dusted; Rhea’s chapter has a broadly punk rock aesthetic, with an emphasis on safety pins, dog collars, and ripped clothing. Rhea and her friends see their clothing and hairstyles as a material expression of their resistance to right-wing politics and societal control. For Rhea, how she looks is fundamentally connected to her self-conception as a punk. Indeed, looking like a punk is almost more important than the music or the politics. It’s disastrous, then, that she’s afflicted with a sprinkling of freckles on her face. She believes that her freckles stop people from taking her seriously as a “punk rocker,” and worries that the bright green color she has dyed her hair won’t be enough to toughen her image. She broods obsessively over the freckles, demonstrating a constant tension between how her body truly looks and the image she wants to project. Bennie wants to be seen as powerful and wealthy, which translates (for him) into being sexually desirable. Rhea’s version of being desirable and powerful starts with being a credible punk. She thinks that changing her material qualities might grant that wish. Whether it's a spiked dog collar and green hair or flakes of Mayan gold, both of these characters rely on material things to define their identities and give them confidence, however fleeting.
Communication—both its presence and absence—also plays a very important role in these chapters. In "The Gold Cure," Bennie's interactions are plagued by a sense of panic and an inability to convey what he wants to tell people. He struggles to reign in his anxiety, so much so that Dr. Beet, his psychologist, has instructed him to write down his intrusive thoughts instead of burdening his son with them. His strained relationship with Christopher and his unfulfilled desire for intimacy with Sasha are both symptoms of this. In order to communicate how he is feeling, Bennie would have to admit to himself that he’s afraid of aging out of relevance. Because he can’t do this, he’s troubled by endless shameful memories and violent fantasies. In contrast, "Ask Me If I Care" contains a lot of expressed emotion, but also doesn’t do much to resolve the resentments and conflicts between characters. As evidence of this, Rhea’s first-person narrative voice brings the reader close to her. It reveals her insecurities in a way that makes us sympathize with her desperate need to be accepted. Rhea is jealous of Bennie’s love for Alice, but she can’t tell him how she feels because she’s scared that it might change things between them. The author implies that everyone in the friend group sees the tangle of crushes between its members, but that none of them are willing to acknowledge or admit them.
