THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 19
happy. That’s, what, two million streams?”
Pérez marvelled at the size of the
shop’s section of CDs labelled “Música
Navideña.” The vinyl stacks, too, were
full of Christmas albums. A random pull:
“Navidad en Puerto Rico con Los Mil-
lonarios,” which, though undated, looked
to be about the age of the shop. The
cover was a photo of a woman in a top
hat and tails with a pile of presents, in-
cluding—lookie here—a saxophone. The
album’s sixth track was one that Los
Lobos had recorded on their album: “Am-
arga Navidad,” by the old ranchera singer-
songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez. (The
fifth track on the Los Millonarios album,
“White Christmas,” was attributed here
to “Berlin-Godino.” “I’m sure Irving Ber-
lin would have been thrilled to share the
credit,” Berlin said. He has observed, in-
cidentally, that Latin music and the He-
brew-school music he grew up with share
similar distinct minor-chord progres-
sions. He said, “They all come from the
same place: Sephardic Spain.”)
After a while, Berlin and Pérez said
goodbye and rode the 2 train to mid-
town. At a touristy Mexican restaurant
in the theatre district, they ordered tacos,
enchiladas, and guacamole. Pérez lightly
chided the waiter, in Spanish, about the
absence of agua fresca on the menu,
while Berlin tried to identify, over the
clamor of the dining room, the music
coming from the speakers. “It’s actually
Cuban,” he said. “A drummer once told
me, ‘If you go into a Mexican restau-
rant and they’re playing Cuban music,
leave immediately.’” This time, they
hung around.
—Nick Paumgarten
1
COMMEMORATIONDEPT.
BEYONDTHEBLUE
L
iza Womack is a first-grade teacher
in her fifties, with wide, rectangu-
lar glasses and hair parted down the
middle, Patti Smith style. She lives in
Huntington, Long Island, in a three-bed-
room house with a “Bernie 2016” sign in
the front window, a “Workers of the
World, Unite!” poster on a wall, and a
paperback copy of “Zapata and the Mex-
ican Revolution” on the coffee table. “I’ve
read chunks of it and enjoyed it, but I’ve
never been able to finish it,” she said the
other day. “Too close to home, I guess.”
The book is by her father, the Marxist
historian John Womack, Jr. Shortly after
it was published, in 1968, he got tenure
at Harvard, where one of his closest
friends was a fellow Rhodes Scholar
from Oklahoma named Terrence Malick.
When Malick made his first feature film,
“Badlands,” he cast John Womack as a
grizzled state trooper. “My dad and Terry
are still as close as brothers,” Liza said.
“A few years after I finished school”—
also Harvard, also history—“I went to
Paris, and Terry was there, and he brought
me to all sorts of dinner parties and in-
troduced me to counts and countesses,
which I thought was pretty cool.”
In late 2017, when Liza was facing a
film-related predicament, she called
Malick. The predicament was born of
tragedy: Liza’s son, Gustav Åhr—known
to friends and family as Gus, better known
to the world as the emo rapper Lil Peep—
had just died, of a drug overdose, at the
age of twenty-one. Handsome, charis-
matic, prolifically tattooed, and photo-
genically sad, he had been on the brink
of international fame, and he left behind
a cache of unreleased footage, both audio
and video. “I was frozen with grief,” Liza
said. She kept getting calls “talking about
how there was going to be a documen-
tary about Gus’s life, and the first few
times I just said no, or ignored it. Then
I called Terry and told him, ‘If this is get-
ting made one way or the other, I’d rather
have you be in charge of it.’”
Which is how Malick became an ex-
ecutive producer of “Everybody’s Ev-
erything,” a new documentary that
makes Lil Peep’s talent legible even to
viewers who might not consider them-
selves fans of either emo or rap, much
less both at once. The film’s spiritual
core is the artist’s relationship with his
family, especially his grandfather. “I split
with Gus’s father when Gus was in high
school,” Liza said. “Gus started acting
out—punching walls, that kind of
thing—and I’d call my dad, freaking out,
and he’d say, ‘I’ll write him a letter.’”
Gus didn’t always respond to his grand-
father’s letters, Liza said, “but I know
he read them, and I know they reached
him in a deep way.” At one point, Gus
posted a photo on Instagram: John
Womack, looking stern, seated in front
of a bookcase and a portrait of Lenin.
“This is my grandpa he is a retired pro-
fessor of Latin American history at Har-
vard and a badass communist,” he wrote.
“#vivalarevolucion.”
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in Hun-
tington, Liza carried a plastic tub of
Gus’s effects downstairs to the living
room. She opened a manila folder marked
“Jack’s letters.” “Every time I found one
of these lying around the house, I was
sure to save it,” she said. “My thought
was, when my father died, Gus would
want them.” Her voice broke. “Hap-
pened the other way around, I guess.”
One letter, written on yellow legal
paper, began, “Dear Gus, dear grand-
son, my prophet, my tattooed poet of
the sweet heart.” From another letter,
also on legal paper: “I know the gold
in you, how good you are at heart.” An-
other, this one typed, ended with “Is
there any particular Johnny Cash CD
you’d like?” Gus appreciated Johnny
Cash, but not the CD format; two years
later, for Christmas, his grandfather
gave him a book called “How Music
Got Free,” about the MP3 revolution.
“Everybody’s Everything” includes
an interview with Gus’s high-school
girlfriend. “Gus literally told me once,
if he was to die, he thinks Jack would
be the person welcoming him into
Heaven,” she says. Near the end of the
film, there’s a long, close shot of John
Womack, in his office in Cambridge,
talking about grief and eternity—“Gus
Lil Peep and Terrence Malick
