An early morning screening for a drug study this morning put Sublime in my head while I slept, the way that happens sometimes. You can get haunted by songs, they chase you in your dreams- I spent two months when I was nineteen hiding from "Getchoo" by Weezer for a reason I can’t fathom. Today it was that line about sticking needles in your arm that was responsible, I think- I’ve always kind of thought it was funny that volunteering for these things has given me track marks like a junkie, and a casual association with needles that is otherwise the province of Lou Reed and diabetics.
Anyway, this isn’t about needles.
That Sublime album has really strong resonance for me- it’s one of those things that I almost never listen to because it’s so tied into a very specific time in my life that I can use it for sensory recall of being eighteen and in that waiting place after graduating from high school. That song "Jailhouse" meant a lot to me even though it wasn’t about anything I related to- it just had a real nice melody that sounded like summer, and it had the line it was the best days of my life in the chorus, and at the time I thought those really might be the best days of my life, the way any teenager who has yet to really understand that life changes, over and over again, and the best days of your life are going to be determined by different criteria at different stages as you go- but there will probably be something better than eighteen and free, even if it’s just twenty-one and free, or twenty-four and free.
I was thinking about the best days of my life, though, and feeling a little sentimental.
Four best days of my life periods:
One- that summer after high school, sure, because I was eighteen and I drove a dying 1986 Chevy Nova- the little red ones that looked like mid-eighties Corollas, not the pre-’85 giant boats that Houston rappers paint bright colors and drive around the Fifth Ward. My parents had left for Texas in November, and by the summer I was living with Nate and Liz Bohannon in their mom’s house. I worked at Coconuts in Lansing, Illinois and a co-worker taught me how to call the label reps and promise to give their artists prominent shelf space in exchange for free CD’s and concert tickets, which kick-started a lifelong obsession with not paying for much of anything. I didn’t have any actual responsibilities and (name redacted because her future employers or whoever don’t need this anecdote) let me put my hand inside her shirt, but nothing else, which was good enough for me at the time.
The whole thing avoided the hint of melancholy that it might have otherwise contained because I knew it was finite, and I know that there’d be no pretense of going back- I was going to Texas at the end of July. Anywhere besides Highland, Indiana, that might have made it more bittersweet, not less, but the only thing I was really afraid of at eighteen was being there forever. I wasn’t going to be going away to college, and if it weren’t for Texas, the coming autumn would have been the time that most of my friends left and I was left behind. That would have been heavy knowledge, something that would have tinged the whole thing with desperation- the creeping fear that this was the last gasp of fun with my high school friends before they went on to college and I hung around and worked at the record store indefinitely. Instead we got to run out the clock together, listening to that Sublime record on the way to cookouts. You know there was a time when those songs were brand new? Most things were, once.
Two- I had a place to hold court, even if it was only the IHOP on N 10th St in McAllen, Texas. My friends were pretty much all of the coolest people in the Rio Grande Valley, and Bob and I were untouchable. I don’t think either of us had jobs, but I had a credit card and it was the sort of all for one atmosphere that meant that we looked out for each other. I wrote lots of poetry and hosted a spoken word night at a coffee shop that got about eighty people a week to come and listen. I had enemies, which was weird, but it was a tiny scene and I was twenty-one, still definitely young enough to enjoy having enemies and the drama that comes with it. It was all really ridiculous and fun- like, I wrote diss poems to Mike Miller that I thought were my equivalent of "hit ‘em up". It was pretty much the first time girls were interested in me, and I was weirded out enough by that that I went and got myself a serious girlfriend who was no fun at all and eventually moved to San Antonio with her.
But that was to come, and what was happening was the same feeling of freedom I’d had at eighteen, but coupled with a feeling of potential that had been missing. All I knew at eighteen was that I wasn’t staying in Indiana; but when that girlfriend and I would go to IHOP to hang out with Donner and his girlfriend (names redacted because none of these things ended well and I am trying to be considerate) I knew that if things had gotten so much more interesting over the past three years, the next three years would have something else to show me.
Three- We listened to "Hey Ya" by Outkast all the time, like all the other Austin hipsters. Upon reflection, I was totally a hipster, though I’d have been offended and argumentative if you’d suggested it to me (which is in itself one of the major defining characteristics of the species). I didn’t wear the tight jeans or do cocaine, but I spent my afternoons at Spiderhouse and my nights at the Whiskey Bar, even if I only ever drank apple juice. It was fun, and my life had been missing that sort of fun for a long time- I liked the IHOP life, but that had been three years earlier, and even then it wasn’t exactly fun- it was friends and a place to belong, but it was still sitting at a booth at IHOP. But at this point I was twenty-three years old and I had a group of friends who were all friends with one another, which has a unique magnifying effect- your relationship with each person becomes strengthened by their relationships to one another. The amount of commonality between you is amplified, and it makes things seem very easy. Groups like this tend to be hard to find and then keep together, but ours lasted about five months, give or take. Until then, though, my life felt like it was fulfilling that potential I’d felt a few years earlier. I was working as a professional screenwriter, my best friend slept on my couch unless he was driving around the country, I had my own apartment without roommates and even though it didn’t have a heater, on cold nights I could call Ani and sleep on the big armchair in her living room and the next morning we’d probably get pancakes.
It was as good as it should have been, and it ended because eventually everything does. Kevin graduated; Cindy moved to Chicago; it stopped being much fun for Erin; I saw enough of the scene to know that, if anything, I was an anthropologist making observations.
Four- It’s not those first few months after Kat and I got together because I honestly don’t remember the details at all, but that is what falling in love is like. I just looked at a calendar and apparently we were together for nine months before we moved to Chicago, but if you told me it was three weeks, I’d have said that sounded about right.
The months in between getting married and moving to London, though, were everything I had pictured life-as-a-grown-up might be. We had a nice place to live that we could afford pretty easily; I was writing a novel and feeling good about it, and I made enough money from my imaginary moving company that I could live pretty comfortably even though I didn’t have to work very much, and I was able to hire my friends to help out most of the time. But mostly it was proof that being something resembling a grown up, and doing grown up things like getting married, didn’t mean that oldness and lameness were the inevitable result. Kat was there and we saw each other all the time, but Donner or Tony could come over any time they wanted and it was never weird; I could hang out with Ani or go to shows and it was just normal, just life. I’d had a vision of a house where people could feel free to come over pretty much any time and this would be a good life, filled with friends and love and creativity. I felt like Kat and I beat the odds, being married folks whose worlds felt bigger, who had more room for new things, once we had committed. Every Sunday during the summer we had a cook-out in the front yard and all of our friends came; we made sausages or fajitas or whatever, and it was like we had made a map of how things could be and then built it.
It’s funny; I think a big part of the reason I never really cottoned to London properly is because in order to come here, we had to leave that behind. And there have been things I’ve done and learned and accomplished in the past ten months that I will value forever, that I wouldn’t trade if it meant that I could have had that time cooking out in good company- not to mention how much it’s done for Kat- but there was a cost to coming here, and I never really thought about it as something that I had to pay before.
And, you know, that’s just the list for today. Ask me again in six months and I might think about the last few months we spent in London, when I never had any money and Kat was working two jobs, so I just spent all of my time writing because it was free and something I could do alone. There’s value in all of this, you know.
