Jay Baron Nicorvo’s Best Copy Available is a stunning memoir that examines how a mother and son ended their cycle of abuse.
The Los Angeles Times wrote of the book:
“This remarkably honest and sometimes humorous memoir shows how one family ended the cycle of abuse.”
In his own words, here is Jay Baron Nicorvo’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir Best Copy Available:
Music runs throughout my debut memoir, Best Copy Available, and most of it’s from the mid-’80s. Clarence Clemons, tenor saxophonist of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, even plays a small part, and Clarence comes on stage on the very first page. A couple of hundred pages later, the final words of the memoir are a song title, though it’s no song you’ll find on any playlist.
Back then, on the Jersey Shore, pop music meant the world to us and MTV made it so. When the book opens, it’s the year of Van Halen’s 1984 and The Eurythmics’ 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother). Of Prince’s Purple Rain. Chaka Khan feels for us. Sting plays his last concert with The Police at the end of the Synchronicity tour. Some of us sing along with Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” not knowing what a virgin is.
Other things, outside of pop music, happen, but we as kids are not much attuned to them, and the two narrative threads running through the book—my mom’s rape coinciding with my molestation at the hands of my babysitter—seem in my memory to be set to music.
“Wolves” by Phosphorescent
Matthew Houck, who records and performs as Phosphorescent, was kind enough to let me borrow a few lines from “Wolves” for my epigraph, and his lyrics set the tone of the whole book. The song is incantatory, a moan almost, but no complaint. It’s an invocation, accompanied by some strumming on the ukulele before the sound turns complicated. In a matter of a few words and chords, “Wolves” gets at the conflicted heart of too many homes, especially for those who grew up in poverty. A mother and child, their safety, gets called into question. Wild animals are at their door. Then, they’re in the house. I love how there’s no panic. The fear itself is nearly domesticated. The threat’s familiar. You get the sense that the wolves have been around for a while, and I can’t help but imagine that the wolves are men. And, man, do I love Matthew’s music. I’d put him right up there with the best American singer-songwriters of my generation. For me, in no particular order, it’s Josh Ritter. Valerie June. Nathaniel Rateliff. Cat Power. Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers. Anaïs Mitchell. And Phosphorescent.
“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson
Hard for me to hear this Blind Willie Johnson blues tune, whatever my intents, and not think: Ah, fuck, in the scene of the rape of America, this here’s the soundtrack. What we’re hearing—in that blind voice, the blind strumming and chord bending—is the sound—if we had the ears to hear—a hollowed-out lynching tree might produce, as men decorate its boughs with the strange fruit of other men, only darker. A ripe giving season of grief. Burdened branches. Maybe, high up, a growth of American mistletoe, parasitic. Pearly white berries, toxic. Dark was the night, cold was the ground alright. And wet. A woe-filled season that often followed fast on the heels of a rape accusation. Because in that bluesy wordlessness, you can almost make out the early, dumbed-down story of antebellum race relations in America, the simplified version anyway: Black man rapes white woman, white man hangs Black man, white man returns home to rape the help. Or his wife, depending. Welcome to Rapeland.
“Jersey Girl” by Tom Waits
This Garden State ballad is a tad more romantic than “Dark Was the Night.” I prefer the grittier original to the cover version that Bruce Springsteen made famous. Waits reportedly wrote the song for the woman, at the time living in Jersey, who would become his wife and lifelong collaborator, Kathleen Brennan. Brennan—not a real Jersey girl; she’s a Midwesterner who grew up in Johnsburg, Illinois—has been a producer and song-writing partner on nearly every Tom Waits album since 1987, starting in earnest with Frank’s Wild Years, that insane sendup of Sinatra, one of Jersey’s own. I love that Waits, the great American bard of loners and losers, has for decades been in what is easily one of the most stable, creative, and enduring rock-and-roll marriages.
“Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters
As long as I’ve been alive, my mom’s been listening to oldies, and her musical tastes never made it past the summer of ’64. That’s when The Drifters recorded their single “Under the Boardwalk,” the version I know best, though you can uncover takes by The Rolling Stones, Bette Midler, John Mellencamp, and the other Jersey boy Bruce, Bruce Willis, off his debut studio album The Return of Bruno. Willis’ rendition spent 15 weeks on the UK charts in the spring of 1987, peaking at #2, and it’s astounding how badly Willis’ music has aged. His crooning of “Under the Boardwalk” is almost too horrible to be believed. It calls into question the musical tastes of an entire decade, of Brits especially. No wonder The Beatles and The Stones were so eager to come on over, and how do we return the favor? We send them the blues and R&B of Bruce Willis. But The Drifters? Theirs is timeless cool, forever to be found in the seedy shade beneath those planks perched all up and down the beaches of Jersey.
“My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen
There’s a scene in the memoir where Mom and her sister go see Clarence Clemons and his band, The Red Bank Rockers, at Wonder Bar in Asbury Park. Between sets, Gail introduces Mom to Clarence, and after the show, he joins them for a drink. The scene’s raucous. This is Jersey, after all. Yet Clarence is calming. He’s a charmer, and he could clobber everyone in the place. Just like that, on comes some slow song. I imagine it’s Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” Why not. As the Boss writes in the foreword for Clarence’s memoir, Big Man, where Clarence walks, “the world conforms to his presence.” That’s not entirely true, not for a Black man in white America. Not then, not now. As Clarence himself notes, “The horn helped. I was softer when I played the horn, and that made them feel safe. Otherwise I felt I was just big and black and scary.” On every stage they graced together, Clarence and Bruce played up these very qualities because they were trying to create, on command and for a paying audience, a real American moment. You can’t tell a true American story without confronting race face-fucking-first. So, Clarence and Mom sway together in time, and Mom shivers at first. When Clarence asks if she’s cold, Mom doesn’t answer, or answers by burrowing into him, ‘cause she’s right back in that night, ground wet, dark. She’s falling into big Clarence, feels safe for the first time in what feels like forever.
“The Stroke” by Billy Squier
This one’s a bit disturbing, so gird yourself or skip ahead, because I have a distinct memory of my molester teaching me—grooming me, as a six-year-old, mind you—to masturbate. While giving instruction, he quoted from the chorus of the Billy Squier song “The Stroke.” It’d been out for a few years by then, but it still played in heavy rotation on MTV and the radio. Music is powerful, but not nearly as powerful as our caregivers, who have the ultimate power over us when we’re little. Our elders’ impressions are lifelong, on our tastes and revulsions. I try to imagine that if my babysitter knew then—and he was little more than a kid himself—that his actions would warp so much of my experience, and for so long, he would’ve maybe refrained, at the very least, from ruining Billy Squier for me.
“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” by Michael Jackson
In a memoir partly about child molestation at the hands of a caregiver, I would be remiss if I failed to include a song by Michael Jackson. And here’s one of my inexplicable favorites, given the way it veers into beautiful unintelligibility. Ma-ma-se, what now? The King of Pop is, of course, also the poster boy for compromised babysitters the world over, though he has yet to be proven guilty. I, for one, believe the accusers, but I don’t condone canceling or deplatforming. Wild that, for a time, radio stations in Canada, New Zealand, the UK and elsewhere removed Jackson’s songs from their playlists, because of the accusations made in the documentary Leaving Neverland. So why the ban? To protect the feelings of people like me? I’d rather you didn’t. If one of Jackson’s songs comes on Radio-Canada while I’m passing through, I can always change the station. To presume that what hurts my feelings, what causes me emotional harm—which I do not equate with physical harm, not by a long shot—should prevent other people from enjoying that music strikes me as the worst kind of condescension. It’s puritanism, plain and simple. I don’t think it helps. It deprives me of agency, and pushes Jackson and his fans underground, out of the light, where he his creepy ass is less a part of the popular conversation. Every time a Michael Jackson song comes on, it’s an opportunity for men like me to talk to their sons about child abuse, and that’s how we get a world with fewer child molesters, not because you make it harder to hear “Smooth Criminal.”
“Frankie’s Gun” by The Felice Brothers
There’s a criminal element at work in the book. More than one. It is true crime, after all, and it isn’t just rapists and child molesters at work onits pages. And no element is more criminal than my Uncle Don, AKA Donald Styles, AKA Don Stiles, AKA Paul White. Uncle Don was a convicted jewel thief and killer, and while our family was gathered for Easter Sunday, 1985, while out on parole, Uncle Don nearly killed my grandfather. Don’t ask me why I associate this Felice Brothers’ song with that event from my boyhood—the gun that was involved was not Frankie’s but Gussy’s. My wife and I did just catch them playing a show here in Kalamazoo, and they killed. For a few years now, they have been my hands-down favorite band. There were originally three Felice brothers in the group—I, too, am one of a trio of brothers—but Simone Felice lit out on his own. Only Ian and Jimmy remain. And how to capture their sound in words? Try to imagine if Bob Dylan and Shane MacGowan bore triplets, and in the basement of Big Pink, outside of Saugerties, NY. And one of the triplets died in childbirth, and then the remaining pair of brothers grew up hardscrabble in the Catskills, where they determined to play a rollicking brand of Rust Belt folk punk to honor their lost brother. The criminals and ne’er-do-wells that populate their songs are mostly New Yorkers of the upstate variety, but when those rapscallions start to feel heat, they go hide in Jersey.
Encore: Two Songs by Sonne Niscorvosen
Memoir is bizarre. There are ethics involved—or there should be—but these ethics are not universal. And dialogue in memoir is largely fictive, more of a channeling, but necessary. Without it, you can’t really bring a scene to life. I have quoted dialogue in my memoir—from the criminal investigation report that forms the heart of the book, from newspaper articles, from audio recordings of interviews I did—but most of the dialogue is a reenactment. To signal to the reader that the dialogue is more recreation than quotation, I leave off quotation marks. Well, in the final scene, I’ve got an exchange with my young son, who was five at the time. I did not want to put a single word into his mouth that he did not speak. I wanted to stay true to him, but I also wanted to bring him to life for the reader because he was—and still is—so very full of life and maybe the single most adorable creature I’ve ever encountered. This is the ethical quandary of the memoirist. Because I could clearly recall him playing his harmonica in that moment, pulling song titles out of the air, and then improvising these bluesy riffs in the way that only children can—children and phenoms like Blind Willie Johnson—but I could not for the life of me recall those song titles. Luckily, I’d shot a home video a few days before the scene I describe, so I took the liberty, the memoirist’s license, of substituting the dialogue from the video, along with those song titles, for my scene. Once I did, the moment, and little astounding Sonne, lived and breathed on the page. So, with Sonne’s teenage permission—he’s 14 at the time of this writing—I close by offering this one-minute music video and its two-song set:
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s playlist for his novel The Standard Grand
JAY BARON NICORVO’s true-crime memoir, BEST COPY AVAILABLE, won the AWP Award selected by Geoff Dyer. His novel, THE STANDARD GRAND, landed at #8 on the Indie Next List, and his poetry collection, DEADBEAT, debuted on the Poetry Foundation bestseller list.