At least someone saw the value in this originality, this out-of-step Dadaism, but that was no thanks to Penny, one of the most charismatic and unique female artists on the East Coast. No, it didn’t go that way. That was simply wrong, because Sheila, not Penny, was mostly behind the original ideas. Sheila had asked Penny to meow into the microphone like a cat, and it had instantly sounded fantastic. Penny was actually her instrument, but of course no one realized it. Not even Penny. Least of all Penny.
It looked exactly how it shouldn’t have: like Penny, her little marionette Penny, was the wellspring of Entropy’s originality, that Penny with her sallow cheeks rampaging in ecstasy on the stage was the one who made everything work. Sheila was hidden behind her drums, even though she was the BRAIN and BACKBONE of the band, and also a phenomenal spectacle, at least in the same class as the singer! And besides, there was something extra in her that there would never be in cryptobourgeois Penny from her middle-class home: Sheila was in mortal danger.
What you might imagine happened did. In that moment of blessing by the Village Voice, Penny became the biggest bitch on Bleecker Street. She loafed around the streets carrying her soprano saxophone like a shoulder bag and made clear to everyone with only the position of her head that it was due to her that Entropy’s gigs began to be so crowded, that people were coming to see her specifically, and that this meant she had to start giving them more. That was why she wanted a tail made of peacock feathers for her leather trousers. That was the final straw for Sheila. Oh, so Penny wants a peacock ass, does she!
The internecine rows and melodramatic disappearances began. First Penny was offended and didn’t show up for band practice for days, and then Sheila began seething with rage and went missing. We don’t know where Penny was, but Sheila was jogging in Prospect Park. When the anger didn’t subside, she defiantly started running in Green-Wood Cemetery, on narrow lanes lined by pure-white tombs and massive family mausoleums, despite the guards’ angrily driving her away, time after time. Have some respect for the departed, miss!
All this turbulence resulted in embarrassingly weak performances, bungled rhythms, and public crying fits, which were followed by even more appalling fights: recriminations, insults, thrown drum sticks, and one split lower lip, which almost ended up in court. “I would have ended up dead if Dovid hadn’t showed up on the scene,” Shlomith said in a tremulous voice to the Vanity Fair interviewer, who was so spellbound by Entropy’s story that he could hear the drums pounding in his ears and see the bony arms with veined biceps swollen like apples from beating the drums in his eyes: in the interviewer’s imagination the arm that worked the hi-hat was an impressive sight with its muscles outlined in almost anatomical relief, although in reality during those years Sheila’s arm was only brutally thin and ugly. “I would have died sooner or later,” Shlomith repeated, swallowing dramatically, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, “if Dovid hadn’t approached me at that bar and just blurted out what he saw: ‘Girl, you aren’t healthy.’”
Dovid decides to heal Sheila—and has a brilliant idea
Dovid bought haggard Sheila a Bloody Mary. This man had such power that he was able to get Sheila to drink it even though she hated the tomato juice, the equivocation of the drink, and how spicy it was; it all felt excessive in her mouth. Very quickly they fell in love. “You have to heal,” Dovid said as he fed Sheila pudding with a spoon; “Have a meatball of love,” he said as he speared one and filled Sheila’s cheeks.
Dovid had the same black curly hair as Sheila, only shorter. He was twenty centimeters taller than her and ruggedly handsome, and that was how Sheila wanted to be too, but she was more rugged than handsome; she was a withered promise, 35 kg, and something had to be done about it quickly. And it wasn’t long before a brilliant idea struck Dovid. He wanted to take Sheila away from New York, where there was too much of a “pathological atmosphere”; where madness was preferred, where unhealthy stunts were practically encouraged. Sheila also wanted out of her home city, out of Penny’s increasingly capricious and egotistical circle of influence. She wanted away from the people standing by the front of the stage, whose stares changed the moment their gazes shifted from the singer to her behind the drum kit. Time and time again when she wasn’t pounding her drums, blind with rage, she saw something twist painfully in those gazes: the unreserved admiration burning in people’s eyes gave
