This story was assigned by a friend to be an intersection with a far superior,
fully realized story. This is like a 2nd
unit production for a movie – a story done in conjunction to the main
production as filler. Yet, having said
this, it was fun to try to get back into writing short stories again, and
though it is completely superfluous, I thought I’d share it with anyone who has
the inkling.
Not sure how
I got into this. I had sworn off doing
music for dances. Yet, here I was,
leaving school on a Friday afternoon and needing to get prepared for a dance. It was another misty day. Misty and windy. My car, a white rust bucket, was squeezed
between Mark’s grey Sundowner and
Simpson’s blue Jetta (also known as Blue Thunder). I’m not sure how I was ever able to get into
the car after school, because they always pinned me in when they arrived for
school in the morning. I drove a hand-me-down
Buick Apollo. It was identical to
their flagship Skylark, but for some
reason was known as Apollo. My dad’s
step-mom kept it in pristine condition for years until she gave it to my dad in
‘78. My mom drove it for a short while
once we moved to the coast, but then it was mostly left to sit in the driveway
until I was old enough to try to revive it so I could drive. The coastal air quickly turned that spotless
car into a rusted out hunk of scrap metal.
There were holes in the floor, where mushrooms would sprout in the
fall. The doors were nearly ready to
fall off. Every time I opened the
driver’s side door, its weight would cause it to drop and debris would sprinkle
the ground. My friend Gary had long ago
coined the car “Squashed Yogurt on the Road,” which had evolved to simply
“Yogurt.”
I slammed
the door into the side of the Sundowner
pick-up with no concern of leaving a mark, and did my best to squeeze my thick
torso into the small opening and behind the wheel. I could hear loose objects moving around
inside the door. I slammed the door shut
and tried to settle in. The seat was
damp, but not as bad as it had been that morning after an overnight
downpour. I turned over the ignition,
shifted into reverse and without looking, scooted back out of the vice grip the
Yogurt had been wedged. I stopped to reach over and hit play on the
cheap boom box lying flat in the passenger seat, shifted into drive, and pulled
away from the school – passing the twenty miles per hour sign on High School
Drive, which had once again had been altered by spray paint to kind of read
“80.” The warbled strains of acoustic
guitar from the intro to Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s “Only Dreaming,” wheezed out
of the player before finding its bearings.
I had clearly cued this song up upon arrival that morning. Essentially, I had been playing it over and
over for weeks. That grinding bass lead,
the gruff vocals, and the lyrics of self-loathing all felt real and true to my
17 year old heart, while I pined for a girl who I would never summon the
courage to talk to. My lack of
self-confidence would prevent me from doing so.
I had never really had a girlfriend up to that point, so I assumed that
my first would be some kind of one-sided mess where I willfully allow myself to
be used and mistreated. “My arms around
you / put me down / In such a special way.”
This was definitely going to have to be on the dance playlist later.
As I drove
along Highway 101, heading home, the mist had become too heavy to continue to
drive without windshield wipers. They
had stopped working at the end of summer, but I learned to drive without them
pretty well. The blurring lines made me
imagine that reality was shifting and that I was either tripping or simply
losing my grasp of things. In this case,
the mist and wind had made it too much of a hazard. I pulled off the highway in a weird wooded
area just north of Nelscott, where the sand and gravel place sat. That place was always a mystery. It didn’t seem big enough for them to
continually mine sand or gravel from. It
always looked the same. A pile of gravel
with some trucks sitting around. Never
any activity. I let the tape continue to
play the rest of the Nothing Wrong
album at a volume which was way too much for the cheap speakers to
withstand. It was a shame. There was a cassette deck attached to the
underside of the dash, but it was unusable.
Years prior, in the brief time my mom drove the car, she had stuck one
of my brother’s mix tapes into the player.
It was named “All My Best.” A
Memorex that came in a case with an L-shaped hinge that lifted to free the
tape. Back then, these tapes came with
tape head protectors – little white nodules that kept the reels from
moving. Well, she put the tape into the
player with those nodules. This did not
end well, being such an old and fragile player, bought and installed in the
summer of ‘78. I’ll never forget my
excitement when my father came home one day with the cassette deck installed
and three tapes: Steve Miller Band’s Fly
Like an Eagle, Roger Whitaker’s All
My Best (clearly an inspiration for the title of my brother’s excellent
early 80s mixtape), and something awful from Jimmy Buffett. The mysterious part is that beside my mom
once commenting that she liked Roger’s voice which she heard on TV advertising
one of those album collections, none of these artists were particularly
interesting to anyone in the family, including my dad who made the
selections. These would be our
soundtrack for a weekend road trip to Roseburg.
Steve Miller was okay. We all
thought the hit song was decent. Roger
made us joke about TV sold music collections from Slim Whitman and K-Tel, as
well as the various amazing gadgets from Ronco, and my class would sing some of
these songs for the music portion of the day at my elementary school. Jimmy Buffett? It was awful!
None of us could take it. We had
to switch to AM radio. Why didn’t he buy
the Blondie, which we all loved? Why not
some Pink Floyd? Why not the Kraftwerk
that he played at home? Or Paul Simon,
Neil Diamond, Neil Young, or The Beatles?
I suppose it was because all those albums were at home on vinyl.
Once the
mist lessened enough to get back on the road, I realized that I had to get some
gas. The only station in town that sold
regular LEADED gas was the old Franco.
It looked abandoned, but if you pulled up to the tanks, a wandering eyed
old man would emerge from the empty building where he would be perched atop an
overturned bucket, and pump your gas. He
would always mime something strange with a toothless grin, in this case, he
pretended to squeegee away water from the front of his eyes. I asked for five bucks of gas, my last five
bucks, and turned the tape over to start The Go-Betweens’ 16 Lovers Lane. I had
purchased these CDs together and immediately copied them onto tape so I could
hear them in the Yogurt. “Was There
Anything I Could Do?” was definitely going to be on the playlist.
After the
gas adventure, on the road again, I caught police lights in my rearview. This had become a tradition. The gas tank opened into the rear of the car,
under the license plate, and since the plate hinge had long ago rusted out, the
old Franco man would always fail to re-attach the plate, so it was
visible. This would generally get me
pulled over. The traffic stop only took
a few moments. Oddly, the fact that I
had non-functioning windshield wipers was not a concern. There was an odd dichotomy with how the local
cops dealt with us teenagers roaming around a boring small town. There was an element of harassment, because
they were constantly pulling one of us over for minor or simply perceived
infractions, yet when they did nab a carload of drunk kids all carrying open
cans of beer, they rarely did anything but give a warning and dump the open
containers.
The Ski Club
asked me to put on this dance. I do not
know why. My only provision is that I
get free reign to do whatever I want.
Which was granted. I was never
sure who all belonged to the Ski Club, but I doubt many of them were involved
with this misguided decision. It was
Lance, my longtime friend and classmate, who asked. He was also quarterback of the awful football
team, the point guard on the equally bad basketball team, and a star golfer on
the oddly state title dominating golf squad.
I suppose with that, he garnered some kind of super powers. After the last couple of dances I DJ’d junior
year, I was done. The effort of toting
the tunes, my turntable, and CD players around was too much and after the dance
earlier that spring, my CD player went dead and two records were broken. The shine had worn off. The first dance I did went swimmingly. It was a fundraiser for my sophomore
class. A couple of seniors that year
tutored me on setting up the speakers and the sound board. Both seemed dubious of my decision to also
connect my home stereo consoles to the board, but they obliged. Everything I played that night seemed to go
over well. I ignored requests for Bon
Jovi and Europe in favor of The Cure, Depeche Mode, Front 242, The The, Julian
Cope, The Smiths and The Bolshoi. Even
when I played an epic fifteen minute version of the Communards’ cover of “Don’t
Leave Me This Way” for a dance contest, the floor was filled and people were
having a great time. Meanwhile, the
dance where my CD player died was full of struggle. I couldn’t get the speakers to sound
good. No matter what adjustments I made to
the connections and on the soundboard, the speakers only expelled painful
vibrations. Waves of sonic pain. When I played Nitzer Ebb’s “Murderous,” the
few people who had come, fled to the school’s front hall, or simply left. Only Kurt stayed in the gym to high kick his
way around the room, while I tried to figure out what was going wrong.
This time, I
requested the dance take place in the multi-purpose room where our tiny drama
club would perform their one play a year.
It was also our lunch room. A
smaller room meant, I could bring in my own tower speakers as well as Mike’s,
who was also set to bring some dry ice for atmosphere. We coined the dance “Echoes” and I made fancy
posters that utilized photocopied album covers and shiny silver tape for
borders to give people an idea of what would be in store. Not only would they be hearing the Cure in
place of Escape Club, but it might be Faith
or Pornography Cure. They would hear Joy Division instead of New
Order. They might hear Bauhaus or Tones
on Tail instead of Love and Rockets. I
was excited to play something off the new Sonic Youth that I picked up at
Driftwood Mac’s the prior Tuesday. Could
I get away with something like “Silver Rocket” and its middle section of two or
three minutes of pure feedback, or would it be another noise to drive people
away?
I had become
accustomed to working every Friday night, but took this one off to DJ the dance. During my senior year, I decided to forgo all
extracurricular activities and work essentially full-time at the pizza joint in
town. I had played basketball all of my
life, but it had become a grind. I
wanted to start earning and saving money for college, which turned out to be
code for spending more and more money on records and CDs. Friday nights were long, because we would get
extremely busy with the influx of tourists coming to our decrepit coastal town
looking for a fun weekend on the beach away from home, and then late in the
evening many of my schoolmates would trickle in and take over the corner booths
and divvy up an order of jo-jo’s amongst six to ten people and smoke cigarettes
and drink Pepsi’s often filled with smuggled alcoholic swill. As long as we had “customers” we would stay
open. It was bittersweet. It was good to see some of my friends, yet
they were keeping me at work. The pizza joint's parking lot was a mystery to me. I know
that high schoolers would congregate out there as a meeting point, or just to
hang out, but every so often some kid would come in bloodied from a fight
looking for help. It was bemusing. I never knew what was going on out
there. All I know is that Joan Jett’s “I
Love Rock-N-Roll” was likely playing on the jukebox for the 456th
time that night and Whitesnake or White Lion was blaring from the little stereo
blasting from the dough room in the back.
All I wanted to do was get home, shower off the pizza stink, and watch
my late night music video shows and then listen to music on my headphones until
I mercifully fell into a fitful sleep. I
wanted to escape. A piece of me wanted
to be a part of the party scene, but a larger portion wanted to be alone.
At home, I
was filled with a deepening dread as I began the process of taking apart all of
my stereo components to take to the dance.
I carefully bundled cords – including the 100 foot speaker wires that I
had purchased for this dance. I dusted
each component and made sure each was secure in a box. I envisioned them all catching fire at the
school. I lugged the giant speakers into
the back seat of the Yogurt and made sure they were protected from the elements
by wrapping them in towels. As I
selected what CDs and records to take, I began to panic, seeing my room bereft
of its central shrine. When I bought my
stereo a couple of years earlier, it was a huge event for me. It was the entirety of my savings. All that mattered to me was finding a sound
system worthy of the amazing music I was ravenously consuming. My musical lexicon had expanded a thousand
fold in the last couple of years with aid of this stereo and I could not get
enough. The idea of not having it made
me queasy. Same with the music. Would the dance end with me weeping over a
pile of scratched and broken discs?
Would some be missing their sleeves, or just simply missing?
Like my new
attitude with school, I had made no concrete plan for the evening’s playlist. All of my life, I had made an effort with
school. I had always managed to get good
grades, but always felt like I lagged behind many of my friends. For my senior year, I’m not saying that I had
given up, instead I decided to not try so hard.
What I learned is that I was a terrible note taker. I would get so busy trying to keep up with
the lecture that I really wasn’t absorbing the lesson. Having stopped taking notes, or really
reading from text books, suddenly, I began exceeding. I was acing tests and scoring well with my
assignments. It was a strange new
confidence. The only thing I had ever
felt confident about in my life was with my music choices. All I needed to DJ that night was a few songs
in mind to be a beginning, middle and end.
The rest would come to me by feel.
I could barely talk to girls, or anyone else for that matter, but I
could match songs together until the end of time, or at least until two tomato
boxes from work full of records and CDs ran out.
Setting up
in the Multi-Purpose Room went as anyone could expect. Mike was late and so was everyone else who
claimed they would be there to help. I
began the task of setting up the speakers.
Since Mike wasn’t there with his pair, I placed mine in the corners
nearest the entrance and as far from the stage as possible and traced the cords
along the walls back towards the mixing desk.
I decided to drag two of the school’s surprisingly powerful monitor
speakers out from oblivion and add those to the mix. I set those up along the walls on either side
at about the midpoint of the room.
Mike’s speakers could go by the stage whenever he decided to show, along
with the dry ice. If he decided to show. I
didn’t know Mike well. He was a friend
of friends. I had worked with his older
brother at the pizza joint. The main
thing I knew about Mike is that he seemed to get into a lot of car
accidents. A lot. Yet, he always had a pristine grey Nissan Sentra.
It never made sense to me.
One thing
I’ve learned when setting up this kind of equipment, nothing works at
first. I had everything jacked in, the
mixing board’s sound meters jumping, but no sound. A few random lever adjustments and plug
checks and POP – the sound came blaring out.
It was New Order’s “Temptation,” which always gets my adrenaline
going. I began jumping around the empty
space both out of sheer love of the song and to gauge the sound quality for the
dance floor. This was about the point
when Mike and Trevor arrived, each lugging a speaker into the room to witness an
awkward, overweight, acne-ridden teen with a nightmare mop of hair bouncing
around the empty room. My heart missed
about three beats and my face flushed with embarrassment at being startled, while
I tried to pretend that I wasn’t dancing around, but instead checking out the
speaker connections. No one said
anything. We quickly hooked up the last
pair, then Mike brought in the dry ice score.
He prepared us for disappointment.
Considering
that we spent nearly every cent of our meager budget for the dance on this big
dry ice plan, it was sad to see how few of the little chunks of the stuff we
could scrounge. As the start time
approached and a few people began to hover around the periphery, we decided to
activate the blocks with some lukewarm water in a tray underneath a chair near
the room’s entrance. A tiny bank of fog
swirled around beneath a chair and nowhere else. Trevor ran to find a fan. Meanwhile, I turned out the lights, and
realized that we had nothing planned for a light show of any kind. No colors.
No gels. Nothing. It was just dark, save for the hallway light
entering via the front hallway, and a couple of stage lights where the mixing
desk stood.
There was a
mirror ball hanging from the ceiling not too far out from the stage, so I
jumped up onto the stage, or really clumsily climbed, and searched for a way to
point one of the stage lights towards it.
Trevor and Mike went in search of lights. We had about ten minutes before the official
start time. A couple of teachers as
chaperones made an appearance: The Barn, the 10th grade English
teacher and The Hippy, one of the two science teachers - both of whom I
actually traded mix tapes with on occasion.
I’m certain they were curious as to how this “Echoes” thing would pan
out. The Barn let us into a closet off
the stage that had a couple of light stands with colored gels. We quickly set those up in the room to
illuminate the dance floor. Trevor did
yeoman’s work getting the lighting to be presentable. It almost looked as if we had a plan. We had been friends and neighbors ever since
he moved to town just as High School began.
He would soon star as Charlie Brown in the play that would be produced
later that school year. He was the anti-Charlie
Brown in real life: outgoing, confident, two time student body president,
successful at reaching goals, but he made his performance work.
I was
drenched in sweat and beginning to grow anxious about this entire event. It was time to start the music, and besides
the two teachers and Mike and Trevor, there were only two or three other people
milling about just outside the doorway. I
hadn’t even begun to cue up potential songs for the night, though I already had
decided with a strange dedication that I would open with Leonard Cohen’s “First
We Take Manhattan.” It was a decision I
made because it did not seem like a good one.
An old croaky man crooning a story of intrigue over a lukewarm dance
beat. The vocals are way out in front of
the music, which sounded dated at the time of release. Yet, this was Leonard Cohen! I needed to educate, although I’m sure that
thought never crossed my mind. Leonard
was a legend. While many of my peers had
been hungrily buying up CD reissues of bands like Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Hendrix,
the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, I had been discovering Cohen, the Velvet
Underground, the Stooges, old David Bowie, and as many of the post-punk bands
inspired by these artists. But most
importantly, Cohen was still creating new tunes to enjoy. Besides, if the song went down in flames,
hardly anyone would be present. In order
to check the sound again, I wandered back out onto the floor, and nodded to a
few recognizable people coming in. It
was Celeste’s gang and their two hanger’s on: the photo-negative twins – Ox and
Nolan, who reeked of cloves. This was
when I noticed that the dry ice fog that had been keeping the atmosphere creepy
under a folding chair had completely dissipated before the conclusion of the
opening song.
A few songs
in, once I got to the Swans cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,”
people started to fill the room and everything became a blur. I do not remember much from then until a
technical issue about three quarters of the way through the dance. I remember being out on the floor a lot –
paranoid that things sounded bad and dancing around so it would look like
someone was interested in this music.
There were a handful of obligatory requests. I politely declined most of them, using the
excuse that I did not have what they wanted to hear. If they produced a cassette version, I would
continue to decline, because I intentionally did not bring a tape player. My hatred of pre-recorded tapes was at a
peak. That night I did play a request
for Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Seven Seas” from Todd, who appeared out of
nowhere, and who had graduated the prior spring. I hadn’t seen him since. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me
back. He was wearing a black trench
coat, which smelled of pot, and intoned slowly: “Seven Seas.” I winced from the booze that travelled ahead
of his words. Then, he was gone.
While I was
setting up a stretch of Creation Records singles to play, all of which I had
found in the city the prior weekend, I received another request. This one came from Kate. She approached hesitantly, so much so, that I
wasn’t sure if she was actually coming my way.
She was a part of Celeste’s group of friends, who included Gary’s
younger sister. Even though she was younger,
she seemed worldly to me, and it turned out that she would become a seasoned
traveler. I knew nothing about her. She was the host sister for an exchange
student and at some point I think she dated my friend Trevor for a brief
period, but none of us ever talk about that sort of stuff. Instead we’d make grand schemes to conquer
media, to tie 100 foot pieces of kelp to our cars and cruise Wayside, or to
walk through town in dresses and motorcycle helmets carrying around giant
wooden silverware wall decorations at 3 AM to the grocery store to harass our
biology teacher who works there. This
willful ignorance and my self-imposed isolation made most people seem more
experienced and interesting to me. I
always felt envious of those who did
things, whether it turned out well or not.
I was always too afraid to take risks.
As I
transitioned from the live Rank
version of “London” by the Smiths into House of Love’s incredible “Destroy the
Heart” single, Kate leaned over and shouted “Do you have Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation?” I responded with a smirk and an affirmative
nod. “Would you be willing to maybe play
“Teenage Riot?” she continued. I nodded
again. Of course, I would! This request became a flash of
inspiration. I’d never heard the
comparison before, but the guitar sound that opens “Teenage Riot” always
reminded me of the sparse early recordings by the Cure. I began to shuffle through one of the CD
boxes for Seventeen Seconds and my
new, but already broken CD case of Daydream
Nation. As “Destroy the Heart”
abruptly stopped, a brief moment of quiet filled the fairly full room before
me. Then the massive treated beat of The
Cure’s instrumental “Three” filled the space.
Ox and Nolan started stomping their feet along. It’s a shame the dry ice experiment failed,
because it would’ve worked well at that juncture. I nudged the volume up a touch just as the
song gained a bit of momentum before it ended with a powerful repeating sonic
pulse that I wanted to vibrate everyone’s teeth and ribcages, as the quiet opening
of “Teenage Riot’ and Kim Gordon’s disembodied voice intoned some kind of
one-sided argument about who is “it” in a game of tag. The next record had already been lined up: My
Bloody Valentine’s “You Made Me Realize” would be next.
This stretch
was magical. This was why I agreed to
DJ. This was the narcotic that infected
me to always want to share the intense feelings that music generates inside me. I wanted others to experience this same
rush. Kate was dancing with a big grin
on her face. Her friends were all out
there. A smattering of mine were on the
scene: Simpson, Trevor, Mark, Lance fresh from the football game, and their
respective girlfriends. Even the girl I
had a crush on appeared in the doorway.
She was definitely one of the reasons I had agreed to do this. A lame effort to get noticed. To impress.
She looked around for a moment, heard the blaring squall of not very
danceable feedback, put her fingers up near her ears, leaned over and said
something to her friend, and then disappeared.
Fittingly, this was when things turned.
The sound suddenly cut out in the area of my speakers. I panicked and ran to them, as if my children
were in danger. I had no song in the queue. Sure enough, my speakers had stopped emitting
sound. I checked the cords. They were still in place. Sweat poured into my eyes as my body
temperature increased by about 100 degrees.
The music was off. The only sound
was that of multiple conversations at once.
I kept looking at my speakers.
Back and forth. Distraught. Wanting to kick everyone out like at a party
when the parents get home before expected.
That was when some fumbling came from the other four speakers and
Lance’s voice boomed out, “How’s everyone doing tonight?!” He rambled on like a radio DJ for a few
moments as he introduced a live version of Big Country’s most famous song “In A
Big Country” from my trusty dusty copy of the double LP Vertigo Sampler. I’m not
sure if it was the damp windswept weather, but for some reason, Big Country was
nearly a universal favorite among my schoolmates. I cannot recall how many times someone would
ask if I could record that live version for them. All of my friends wanted it, but as time
passed I was often approached by someone I didn’t know, or never communicated
with. With his sudden turn at cheesy
radio DJ, Lance saved the night. The
show went on a bit more, but I was mentally done. I unhooked my unresponsive speakers and took
them out to the car one by one, swaddled like infants, before heading back in to
finish playing music until the allotted time ended. People began to trickle out. Making post-dance plans – either looking for
somewhere to party or for some privacy.
Mercifully,
the time came to shut it down. I closed
the night with the frenetic Peel Session version of Joy Division’s “Love Will
Tear Us Apart.” Yes, again. Only a few people remained by that
point. By the time I finished putting
things away and gathering my stuff near the front entrance of the school, no
one was to be found. I propped the door
open with one of the tomato boxes, pulled my car up to the drop off circle, loaded
the car, and headed home to the tinny soundtrack of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s
Chris Reed singing through gritted teeth that there’s “Nothing Wrong.”
“Feeling Good, Feeling
wrong
Holding out, holding
on
There’s a lot to do,
lot to say
Just so you can have
today
Party here, party
there
No one ever really
cares
If you’re holding out,
feeling strong
Tell yourself there’s
nothing wrong”
