I started blogging about why I had been blogging about being twenty for about two weeks when the internet gods came down and crashed my browser. Message received: no one cares.
Anyway today I travel. Tomorrow I get old. Monday I’m still out of a job. Really there’s no difference now is there?
so this post isnt a total waste
i see this card in my future
this one is wildly more accurate
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The last in a series of stories from when I was 20 years old, in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of my 20th birthday. Since my birthday is this Friday and I really don’t know how much time I’ll be spending online between now and then, I’ll finish this theme blogging experiement today.
You were one of my favorite people. You scared the hell out of a lot of people, but I’d always liked you. Yeah, you were out there, tatted up and playing some of the craziest most innovative music I had ever heard. Your live shows were insane. And then your band got signed and you changed your name and you belonged to a lot more people than my little town.
You always asked for me when you guys would come back to town, even before my friend was dating someone in your band. You asked for me as a photographer, as an MC. You always asked how my family was. I remember introducing you on stage for the first time the summer when I was twenty and I was so nervous. It was a big festival show, your idea of course, a way for all the local bands to play and get seen. You showed up in time to catch even the smallest of the local bands, running around backstage in your Depeche Mode t-shirt laughing and joking with everyone. Jumping on stage with whomever asked, no matter who they were, running on stage to fix a fallen guitar strap.
I remember being nervous, your record rep giving me some kind of speech to say and you waving him off and telling me “Just go, you’re going to be great,” and it is still one of my favorite memories, because, yeah I was. You helped me stand up in front of like two thousand people and get my little moment in the sun. You were like that.
I remember the next day being at another festival show in another city with you. You guys were on early but it didn’t stop people from seeing you, wanting to meet you. I had you sign my laminate for “posterity.” I remember talking to you in the crowd later and some large group of people swarming you and you looked overwhelmed and I grabbed your hand and we just ran and I shoved you back into the backstage area over by a Red Bull cart.
My girlfriend started dating some dude in your band. I saw you all the time. Drove you guys around when you were drunk. Drove her to every city within four hours to see you. Hitched rides with you guys when we could. You scared the dirt bags away from me. You guys made a video and had a big party to release it. I “snuck” in even though I wasn’t twenty-one, re-met some people who are now some of my most cherished friends. Sat on stage with you while you played. Stayed out all night.
I remember you when things went off the rails. You were never unkind to me, even in the bad times. Sometimes I would run into you places and we’d just talk. You were always my favorite person to talk to during that time, because you’re scary smart and just funny and kind and so many people don’t know that.
It was never like that between you and I. You were just the coolest motherfucker I knew and I was just glad to be in your circle of friends, even years later when we’d see each other and you’d hug me so hard, like you do when you love someone straight up from the heart.
I ran into you a few years ago during the holidays, on a friend’s birthday, a friend who was a big fan of yours back in the day and you totally called her for me and wished her happy birthday. Because I asked, even though it was stupid. I always thought that was way cool.
So many things have changed in the last ten years, since we used to hang out all of the time, but one thing never will, you were one of the coolest people I ever knew, when I was twenty, before and afterwards.
I miss you and hope we can hug it out again some day soon.
____
So yeah, last attempt at blogging on a theme ever, I kind of give up. I’m feeling kind of drained and pretentious.
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Another in a series of stories from when I was 20 years old, in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of my 20th birthday.
I sometimes wonder if things would have gone differently if it wasn’t for THE PARTY. P’s 20th birthday happened to fall during a long weekend where my grandma decided to go out of town and leave me in the house, mostly because I was twenty and also because I had to work all weekend.
We didn’t have a small house by any means. Three bedrooms, two baths, den, living room, all sitting on about two acres of land, with no direct next door neighbors. Pretty much a party pad if you wanted to have a party. And we did. Because, P was turning 20 and his parents were going through a divorce and it was ruining a lot of things for P and because at the time P was one of my closest friends.
The party took place after a couple of shows downtown, so everyone was going to come over later. My friend R got there early to help me set up and move anything breakable into a closed off room. My friend Audrey brought her turntables and set them up in the kitchen. M did some bbq-ing in the backyard and there was enough booze to choke several elephants. Everyone who showed up kept bringing more. I’d go to open the fridge and cans of beer would go everywhere.
For all of that though, the party was pretty calm. I didn’t really have housewrecker friends by any means and for the most part everyone stayed outside. The only rules were: 1- don’t break anything. 2- don’t drive if you’re too drunk and 3- no one answers the phone but myself or R, who my family knew was staying with me. Simple enough right?
There are always complications with any party. A girl friend of mine getting too drunk and wanting to hook up with me. A few uninvited guests. BBQ fire. An overflown toilet…
Then there was the minor drama. I had been very casually dating a kid from my journalism class who couldn’t get it through his head that I wasn’t his girlfriend and that I had been trying to distance myself from him every since I found out he was still talking to his crazy ex girlfriend. I was just trying to make it through the last week or so of our class together before I dumped him flat out, but he wasn’t getting the hint at all. I really did not want him at the party just because he was kind of a goober to be honest. So we told him the party was at M’s house.
This worked out really well when he drove by my house and saw like fifty cars in my driveway. Whoops. M and R ran interference and I hid in the back bedroom with my other friend K talking out some drama we supposedly had and the guy from my class walked all over my house looking for me and yelling and acting really mad.
“I thought she said the party was at your house bro,” he says to M
“This is my house dude.” M says looking bored.
Eventually the guy left and I got to come out of the bedroom. But he wasn’t the only party crasher we had that night. There was another band in town that I was friends with. Their act included a lot of breaking fruit on stage and wearing John Waters looking costumes. They were all invited but one of their “circle” showed up too. At first it was cool. The guy brought beer and was generally pretty quiet. And then he was too quiet.
We found him in my bathroom first. He’d sort of wet the rug and said he came into the bathroom to get some water. I wasn’t really listening because I was trying to get him into the backyard, since he was kinda all pee covered. He went out back finally and then all of a sudden BOLTED for the backfence and started hurling violently over the fence. We were all confused, P especially since he’d been in another room when we brought Pee Dude outside.
“Yeah dude, I don’t know he said he just drank a glass of water in the bathroom, now he’s puking.” I open another beer and sit down on the backsteps.
“Bathroom? Which bathroom?” P looks frantic and it’s at this point I realize he’s wearing his glasses, which he wasn’t wearing earlier.
“The front bathroom.”
“That wasn’t water.” P says and sits down.
“Wait, what?”
“The dude fucking drank my contact lenses. I left my case at home so I put them in a glass in the bathroom. ON THE TOP OF THE TOILET ORGANIZER! He had to climb up to get them. Fuck.”
“So wait, that guy drank your contact lenses?” I was laughing so hard I was pretty sure beer was going to straight up come out of my nose. P didn’t really see the humor, but there wasn’t much to be done at this point. I’m still pretty sure stomach acid isn’t so great for contact lenses, I don’t care what kind they are.
The party began to break up a little after that and I assigned beds and couches to my friends who were sleeping over. In the morning we all pitched in and cleaned up the house, putting everything back the way we found it, pretty sure I wasn’t going to get caught. I actually did get “ratted out,” by my shithead cousin, but my grandma didn’t even care, the house was cleaner than when she left.
The party though, is the point where I can see that group of friends I had at nineteen starting to come apart, blending into the group of friends I would find after turning twenty and splintering completely. It wasn’t all American Pie or anything, but so many different threads of the same story came out over the course of that night and so many things happened in the quiet afterwards, the drunken talks in darkened bedrooms waiting for the sun to come up, they are what changed everything a few months later.
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I had three jobs when I was twenty. Only two I got paid for, the other was just something I fell into. I was working in radio, DJ-ing and booking bands at a club and I was sort of a freelance photographer for various bands in town. Sometimes I’d get paid in film or drinks and I’d get my photos used on websites and I thought that was pretty cool.
Radio was obviously my day job. The club DJ thing came up unexpectedly at the start of the summer. A new all ages venue was opening up and they contacted me through the radio station about spinning there on Friday nights. I went in and met everyone and looked at the equpiment and started compiling the music I’d play. At the end of the night, the owner would hand me a chunk of cash and we’d all go party somewhere. For the first month or so, it was good times.
Everyone working there was between seventeen and twenty one. Two of the bouncers Seth and Kevin lived downtown a few blocks from the place in this brownstone building. We partied at their house quite a bit after hours. There were a couple of other girls that worked at the juice bar and me and my friend P who I had gotten a job there as well. We’d get beers and go back to Kevin’s and blast music and eat Taco Bell. Eventually I’d take P home and head on back to my place and crash.
The problem with an all ages club is you make money by charging cover. And you have to have people at the door willing to take money even from their friends. And people still will show up drunk and start fights anyway. Eventually we stopped doing as many DJ nights and started booking in bands and having me spin between sets and run the sound. This was great too because hey, I knew everyone already, let me get my rolodex and I’ll get you everyone that’s cool this summer.
My falling out with the owners had to do with this. Two things happened. First they stopped paying me as much because they weren’t making any money. I accepted that because it was in cash and basically served as my walking around money for the week while I was socking away my paychecks to buy a new car. Then the big debacle happened.
At the time there was this band in town that everyone thought was going to be the next big band to get signed. They were doing big gigs everywhere and sold out every shitty club they played in. That summer they were tapped to go play some festivals in Europe. For a month everyone waited for them to get back and regale us with stories of hairy women and muddy bathrooms. Their manager set up their official homecoming show three days after the plane landed and the town buzzed with it.
The owner of the club I was working at was pissed that the “rival” venue got this show. He tried to get through to their manager to set up one a day earlier or whatever but kept getting the stonewall. Finally one day he comes into me and tells me he did it. We were going to have this band on the day their plane landed two hours away. I asked him how he did it, and he said not to worry about it, it was done, and handed everyone a stack of fliers and called the newspaper.
A few days later I get a phone call at work from a girl that was dating one of the guys in this band. Apparently they didn’t know jack shit about this show. It had never been booked. This girl knew I worked there and called me to see what was going on.
“Fuck.” I said
“Fuck is right. Look I know they’ll probably do it for you when I explain that you didn’t know how he did it. I’ll call you after I hear from D*** again.” She hangs up and I am furious. I call the club owner, who’s name I’ve long banned from my memory and ask him what the fuck.
“We needed to have this show.” He says
“You’ve really put me in a fucked up place man. If they’re pissed at me about it, we’re done.”
The day before the plane was to land the girlfriend called me back and said they’d do it, but I should probably round up an extra opener or so because they were coming straight from LAX. To play this show. For me. And they did. And it was epic. And we made a ton of money that night and so did the promoter of the original homecoming show that happened not even two days later. But I was still pissed that the club owner had put me in such a gross position.
My final night of working at this place happened about two weeks later. Someone had booked this seriously skanky butt metal band into the place and it was completely empty. I worked the sound, dealt with the assholes in the band being rude to me and my crew and even helped clean up after there was a minor fight in the juice bar. At the end of the night the owner walked up to hand me my “pay” for the evening and I remember counting it in front of him.
“Seven dollars? Are you fucking kidding me? Seven fucking dollars?”
“Well it’s a slow night.” he says
“Well you have a bank account. I’ve been here for like seven hours dealing with assholes. There are kids in third world shoe factories that get paid more than this.”
“Look it’s what we made. Come back in tomorrow night and I’ll try to get you some more money.”
But I didn’t go back in. I took my seven dollars, bought a pack of cigarettes and some Sonic and went home. I didn’t step foot back into that place until the last night it was open, which was only about four months later. That club was open for less than eight months and by the time they closed down, none of the original crew still worked there. Someone bought it later on and last time I checked it was a gay bar.
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I think it was a Friday. My friend T called me up and said the magic words, “Let’s go get drunk.” But I was twenty and the only place we could think of that we could both for sure get in was one of the clubs where all the bands played. So we went to a show we really had no interest in going to, because T could sneak me beers and we could in fact, get drunk.
I realized I knew some people there when we got in. Some people in my group of friends I’d been exiled from by P were playing as well as this weird nu metal band full of younger kids. It was a weird bill. But it was basically free to get in and there were copious amounts of draft beer to be drank.
I remember what I was wearing for some reason. Long black skirt, gray v-neck t-shirt. Boots. Too much make up. Whatever. About three beers into this experiment of getting drunk for the hell of it and listening to the nu metal band and noticing that the kid playing the bass had pretty eyes when someone else gave me a CD.
Later I would get an email from this guy. The CD guy. And later still I would find out I’d been videotaped drunk at that show by this guy. And even later still we would date and it would be wonderful for awhile and then it wouldn’t. This would be the person I would be with when I turned twenty one. And we would fight and make up and fight again.
It wasn’t him. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t anything but people that shouldn’t have dated because they were both too damn stubborn and too different to work. People who were too young to know what they wanted and too entirely inexperienced at being grown up to make it work.
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It was a song you wrote.
It was your birthday.
It is a number on a cd.
It was a song you and I heard together.
Seven.
Always seven.
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We don’t talk about it.
We do not talk about how you have been the only person to be amazing to me on several occasions. We do not talk about how even the sight of your hands makes me nervous. How you think I’m amazing. How you and I can not stay out of trouble. It’s been a long time.
I was able for a bit, to ignore how I felt about you. I’ve tried to give you away so many times. I tried not to think about how your laugh, your voice, your idiotic smile is so much like the last one. Some boy in some band sent here to fuck up my life. What the fuck is it with you people? Why can’t I grow the fuck up?
That couch at that club. It’s listened to us talk too much. It’s seen too much. I tell you too much. You have that kind of face. I just want to give you everything sometimes and I think you know this. You’re just so easy to make happy. We fit together, and then we don’t.
Everytime I see you, I can not think about anything else for days. If aliens scanned my brain, they’d be shocked at what I was thinking. Horrified. They’d wonder what the fuck was wrong with me, and they’d be right to do so. You’re straight from hell. Evil. Straight up. Which is why I like you so much. Which is why you’re dangerous. Which is why we can not behave.
You were the first person I met here. I remember it, you and me in this dive bar. You smiled that lazy stupid smile of yours. Introduced yourself and told me you liked my jacket. Said I always made you laugh. Said I was beautiful.You always say that. You always just reach out for me like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Because it is and it isn’t and you are straight up from hell and most likely my punishment for everything I’ve ever done wrong. Your silly laugh. Your killer eyelashes. Your dumb smile. The way you smell. You’re just another one, like all the other ones and you’ll probably ruin my life. It happens. All. The. Time.
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My friends planned a surprise party. And by friends I mean this one guy I don’t talk to anymore. And by planned, I mean he invited everyone that he wanted to be at my party and very few people that I wanted there. One in particular. Because they had figured out what we had done.
Maybe it was the time we showed up late to a show at one of the clubs we were always at and he was wearing my Videodrone shirt. Maybe it was because we started doing things by ourselves because we got along better than the others, because we understood. Maybe it was because the night of P’s epic birthday bash at my house, this friend slept in my room. Maybe it was…
We all know what it was. We all know why the one person I wanted at my birthday wasn’t allowed to be there. I won’t even write it down, because it’s ridiculous. It was petty. It was stupid. We let P run our lives. And really I will never know why we did at that time because these people he kept insinuating he would cut us off from were just as much, if not more our friends as his. And very few of them chose sides. And very few of them cared when a few months later, P cut me off too.
I remember the exact moment we stopped pretending to be friends, but it had been a long time coming. From P judging the handful of boys I would date that summer, to dictating when we would all quit working at that club, to trying to tell me that my friend K actually didn’t like me at all, which ended up being the furthest thing from the truth, it was in the mail.
The weekend we stopped being friends I had to work a lot promoting the BMX thing at the fair that I met BMX Boyfriend at. One of the nights I had P’s girlfriend in my car and while I was getting gas, she saw my journal in the car and read part of it where I was complaining about P’s attitude. I was surprised she read it, but unsurprised that she probably told him what I said. Because the next night I picked them all up from work after watching the BMX boys hotbox the half pipe’s dressing room and we ended up in a fight about several things. I snapped. I probably said some things I shouldn’t have but I had just heard one disapproving thing too many from the 50 year old 20 year old at that point. I took them home. I called soon to be BMX boyfriend and we went to Carrows and ate.
Breaking up with friends is just like breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. There’s the returning of stuff. The chosing of sides, of places that you get and they get. I got what I wanted. I got quiet. I got most of my friends back that had been alienated. I got new friends. I eventually got R back too, even though it took awhile and at first, it wasn’t exactly the same and then it was better.
I really tried to rekindle my friendship with P later in life. I did a couple of things for him and his girlfriend, who I adored. And maybe it was my boyfriends at the time that made it not work out or maybe I was just past this point in my life, but it was never really possible. And that’s okay too.
But the night I turned 20, P was there. R wasn’t. And I stood out on the balcony of my friend’s apartment swigging off of the official summer beverage of Corona, waiting to go home.
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Another in a series of stories from when I was 20 years old, in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of my 20th birthday.
I was in love for a couple of months when I was 20. It was purely accidental. I walked into work one morning and the guy who did the shift before me had a friend visiting from the next town over. I had been up all night at the Star Wars premiere and really just wanted to crash on the couch in the break room for an hour before my shift. But there was already someone sleeping on it.
“Wake him up.” My friend shrugged. “He’s been asleep for a few hours.”
Instead I balled up my coat and laid down in the floor. About an hour later someone was shaking me to wake up and I opened my eyes and saw M for the first time. He was kind of grinning at me and I just thought “Huh, he’s cute.”
We both did the same thing for a living. We both liked all the same bands. We both dyed our hair a lot. He was about six months younger than me, but that didn’t really matter. He was funny and silly and decidely not like most of the people I was running around with that year. He was without pretension and I instantly liked him.
It seemed to go both ways because he started calling me at work once and awhile. Or randomly showing up to visit the guy before me, but staying until I came in at 5am. And then staying until the office opened later on. One night later that summer I got a call from T at work telling me we were going to a concert, that M was coming, that I’d best get my ass down there. We danced. We went up on the bus of one of the opening bands because M had done a show with them in his town. They wanted to show him their Jager tap. I wanted to try the Jager tap. We fell off the bus.
T had to get to work and asked me to go get him some food, and to drop M back at his car. After delivering the food, I asked M if he wanted to see the club where I worked and he did. We drove over and took a tour and sat on the trunk of my car in the back parking lot talking until one of us got the courage. I don’t remember who kissed who. It doesn’t matter. In a flurry he invited me to come up and go to another show with him where he lived. I agreed and figured I’d work it out.
I remember being nervous about seeing him again. And at first it was just like it had always been, just him joking with me and acting like we were friends. I met a bunch of people he worked with and as I was getting ready to leave he spun me around in front of everyone and laid one on me.
We tried. It wasn’t the distance that was the problem. An hour each way. I went up to see him on a whim many many times. I went to work events with him. He came down to see me. We talked on the phone. We traded tapes. We wrote letters. We made a really cute couple. It wasn’t even that our friends didn’t get a long. It was something else entirely and I didn’t even realize it.
He left. Not me, not really. He left to go on this long trip. To meet his family. To go see where he came from. He called a few times while he was gone and then I didn’t hear anything. And I came to work one morning and there was a gift for me. He’d brought it in but didn’t stay to see me. Didn’t return my calls.
I guess I’d always known that there was a reason that our relationship never felt, I don’t know, official. Like it always felt temporary and fleeting. Not like a dream so much as like I know that this is only going from point A to point B and then I’ll be getting off the train and we’re not going to be going to the same place. Maybe I knew he was gay before he did and I was just willing him not to figure it out for himself.
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