Coney Island Baby, the words floated in my mind like something slightly ridiculous—a carnival prize won and then left to rot in a pocket. That’s what I thought of Lou Reed and his absurdly titled LP. The one I was working on when I was a nineteen-year-old apprentice audio engineer. And poor Lou was doing nothing to improve my feelings toward him. 

He was leaning his head on the console and doodling in black ink, drawing circles that bled outward in contorted halos across a small white page. The pen was leaking, and his fingers were stained as if he had dipped them in midnight. Lou didn’t seem to notice, the ink or me. If he did, he simply didn’t care. Nor did he care, it seemed, about his own record.

I attributed his hardboiled attitude to a kind of failure. I would care about my record. I would hold it close. I would suffer for it properly. I hated him for not suffering correctly.

Silently, of course. Because silence was my trick.

Without a word, I set up a stool, a microphone, a music stand, and headphones. Then I made dark the room. There could be no light when Barry Manilow recorded his vocals.

We moved through the studio in a quiet exchange of places—I left my setup and returned to the control room while Barry left the control room and moved into the booth. Unless the microphone needed adjusting, my work was essentially over. But I was required to stay. Seated between the producer and head engineer, I was still learning, even though by then I knew everything.

Bored, I opened the book—House of Incest by Anais Nin. It was a door to another atmosphere—and I stepped through it. Her words “I am alone, I have always been alone, and I shall always be alone” felt more real in the room than Barry’s weekend in New England, “When will our eyes meet? When can I touch you? When will I hold you again? When? When? When?”

Listening to him croon, I escaped into the padded walls and evaporated.

The next day I was fired from This One’s for You, the album, for reading. It felt less like an ending and more like being shoved off a path I was never meant to walk. I buried the embarrassment quietly, as though silence was the only thing strong enough to hold it down.

In a room full of musicians orbiting like cautious moons around Frank Sinatra, I leaned over the console and pretended to turn knobs. Frankie, at sixty, was trying to bend himself into a disco pretzel, and no one was saying anything. When he winked at me with one ol’ flirty blue eye, I felt compelled to whisper, Frankie, give it some heart, make it real, or just forget about it. Instead, I tugged on my new black turtleneck, a quiet boa constrictor ever tightening around the neck, a reminder of how truth could kill a person. And so I remained alive.

The Hammond B-3 was a massive church organ, and I had no idea how to approach it. It had keys like a piano, and something called stops that had to be pushed or pulled. Beneath it, a row of wooden pedals begged for my feet to find them, but my legs were too short to reach. Brian Eno insisted I play the B-3 on one of his songs—a piece that felt like weather passing by unnoticed.

I shook my head vigorously.

“It’ll be fine,” Eno assured me, “You can play any note, at any time, in any rhythm, as long as you don’t hit the F-sharp.”

Forgoing the pedals, I made a series of unnecessary, incongruent noises, holding the F-sharp more than once as if my finger was crazy-glued to it.

“Please,” I implored. “Please, let me do it over.”

“No,” he said, “It’s perfect.”

I was crushed.

“You should quit this engineering stuff,” Eno continued. “It’s not you. You belong on the performance side of the glass.” Eno not only heard me, he saw me.

I didn’t speak, and at last, I didn’t disappear.