The Ever Passing Moment – MXPX
Growing up I never thought much about college. It wasn’t even so much a hypothetical as it was a non-issue. In high school, amongst my closest friends, college was a word the same way onomatopoeia was a word; if you used it you were probably using it wrong. There were plenty of other words we tossed around instead, words like girls, and sports, and yo, that were a helluva lot more relevant to the sort of conversations were we having. When graduation came and went college was still the last thing on my mind. One day, a few weeks into the summer, Lynn, the girl I was dating, cornered me as I was closing up the gas station I was working in. That moment, sort of the early-adult version of when growing up your mother would say, “You’re not leaving the table until you eat your broccoli,” Lynn more or less gave me an ultimatum; I either went and signed up for college or I was cut off from getting laid. Lynn knew how to bargain and her scare tactic worked. I went to the nearest college, filled out the application, took the required testing, and within a week I officially became a college student. It was the local community college, nothing special, but we both thought it was a something, a step in the right direction, and in the meantime I got back to focusing on what was really important. Sex. Not two weeks into my first semester Lynn and I were no more. She’d moved away and found someone new. And for me college was more like a bad case of déjà vu than a step in the right direction. Seventeen, I was surrounded by hordes of people I’d seen since I was six; lunch tables in the cafeteria looked as they did in tenth grade; the same faces, the same who was screwing who conversations. All of it sucked. As far as I could see college was nothing but a marathon of bad reruns, a precursor to going where I’d already been, and to top it off I went from getting laid to not. With taking a couple semesters off here and there it took me three-and-a-half years to graduate. After I graduated all I wanted to do was a whole lot of nothing. I worked full-time in a warehouse, shipping books across the world. When I wasn’t working, the guys I worked with and I played Nintendo 64 and smoked bongs, well into the hours where people in the productive world were sleeping. Before long I started to notice grey hair, both on myself and on my friends. Some of them were celebrating their 30th birthdays, some were even approaching 40. Nobody seemed happy; everyone more or less just was. I was barely twenty-one and not much different. One day while playing Mario Kart in the living room, I looked through the pot-smoke haze. It felt like the lot of us were in a closet and no one was looking for the door. That night I started thinking about a way to get out. College, a real college, seemed the easiest way to go about making a change.
Unlike in high school, from my experience at community college, from the flunkies who drank themselves out of more prestigious universities, I heard the stories of debauchery, of newfound friendships, and in that time and frame of mind of wanting change, college suddenly all seemed grand. When I started looking into schools I was more excited about the prospect of living in a dorm than I was getting back into a classroom. I had plenty of preconceptions of what it might be like; I’d seen all the movies, from Animal House to Back to School to Road Trip. The whole process of getting in—application, acceptance, figuring out financial aid—being mostly anticlimactic and less than two weeks quick, the daydreaming felt like it became a reality when I was sent my room assignment and the name of my roommate, Jed. I was just as scared as I was excited. I was older than most, if not all, of the people I’d be living with and I had never lived in the same room with anyone. I was 21 going on 22 when I packed up my life and moved away from everything I knew into a dorm room with two twin-sized beds. Bon Jovi and Styx were carved into the robin-egg blue brick walls; there was an iron stain on the desk/dresser. I took the good side of the room—the bigger closet, the more comfortable bed—before Jed got there. When he did, he pointed that fact out.
Game on.
A college dorm is a lot like the way I picture Ellis Island was in the early 1900’s; a bunch of people from seemingly all over converging into one space with their bare minimum of a lifetime’s worth of possessions in tow, everyone full of hope based on their new opportunity, but the communication barrier is so daunting, a Berlin Wall-like hurdle to overcome if you ever want to get anywhere. The most common ice breaker amongst people of that age and disposition is alcohol. I wasn’t a drinker so I went with the next best option: music.
A week into my second semester a bunch of us went to a dance club in Erie for college night. Dressed in clothes that pretty much guaranteed that none of us would get laid, Jed, Greg, Rick, Ben, and I set out for that exact purpose. The five of us sat in the parking lot of the club, four of them passing a brown-bagged mixture of cheap vodka and Hi-C between them. “We’re going to get you some ass,” Greg said to me, “So you can forget about that bitch.” The truth was I wasn’t thinking as much about Ellen as I was the girl I had seen two days prior in the lobby of the campus University Center. Strangers, she and I were locked in a silent staring stalemate from across opposite sides of the room. I was in love with her in an instant, that sort of love at first sight cliché come true, but I couldn’t find the courage to close the distance between us and tell her. Eventually her crew of friends tired of the situation and they left, and I was left to swallow another shot of failure. “Let’s go get some ass!” Rick yelled from the backseat. His eyes were bloodshot and his speech slurred. It was obvious the alcohol had done the trick.
I’d only been in a handful of clubs in my life and they were all more or less carbon copies of one another; blinding neon beer signs, the stench of stale urine, and the ear-deafening bass thump of whatever fly-by-night rapper was popular that week. This place was no different. Since the vast majority of people there were underage the bar was used strictly as a leaning post for those who weren’t brave or drunk enough to gyrate on the dance floor below. None of my friends could dance but that didn’t stop them, first picking out a space on the periphery, and then song-by-song working their way towards the attractive women in the middle who could dance. I watched for a while but it was too embarrassing and soon my friend Rick joined me at the bar. From the other side of the room we noticed two girls glancing at us. “Dude, she’s…” Rick started to say. “I know,” I said, “Hot.” The taller of the two girls was blonde, with blue eyes accentuated by the neon Labatt’s sign beside her. She had on skin tight jeans and an assassin’s smile. She and I took turns glancing at each other, both looking away right before being caught. Life is full of second chances and here was mine; I either had to man up or move my eyes elsewhere. But I still couldn’t talk myself into it. In all of my years of dating I was never the one to approach the girl; I had no clue on the logistics involved in telling someone you’re interested. Luckily Rick was drunk and in no mood for stalling. “Follow me you pussy,” he said as he grabbed my hand and lead me across the room.
The four of us fumbled through syllables and conjectures before the blonde looked me in the eyes and said, “I thought you would be too big of a pussy to come talk to me.” We laughed; Rick’s eyes widened at her bluntness. It was obvious her ball-breaking ways would go over well. As it turned out she lived in the same dorm as my friends and I, a floor above us, and she was new to the college last week, having transferred after spending a disappointing year and some change at her local community college. I took this life parallel, the fact that she was an art major, and intrigued that I was a writing major, as promise; I wasn’t really looking for fate, but I was going to answer if it came knocking. A few days prior, with the girl in the UC, I hadn’t answered the call; that wouldn’t happen again. “Do you want to hang out sometime?” I asked. “Isn’t that what we are doing now?” she answered before sticking her tongue out at me. “I’m kidding,” she said after I let silence linger for longer than she felt comfortable. Two could play this game; just because I had never baited the hook didn’t mean I wasn’t good at fishing. “What room are you in?” she asked. She wrote my room number on the back of her hand, and we went separately into the winter night.
The next day there was a knock at my door. Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with her. Sitting in the cafeteria, picking at cold pizza, we talked about the previous night, how awkward it was, watching drunken strangers make asses of themselves, watching sober guys not have the balls to say hi to pretty girls. Before long the conversation turned to music. She asked me what sort of music I liked, who were my favorite bands. “I love MXPX,” she said. MXPX was a band I’d heard of, but didn’t know much about. Within an hour we had returned to her room, grabbed her CD case, and set off for a drive in my car. Her choice for the ride was The Ever Passing Moment, MXPX’s most recent release. The album opens with a simple guitar riff and within seconds the drums and bass join in to bring the toe-tapping “My Life Story” to fruition.
Don’t hate me forever,
I’m better late than never
I failed you
I’m sorry
That’s simply my life story
In an instant, as I looked across the car at Natalie bopping her head along with the beat, I understood the appeal of both. This was pop-punk at its most pure: simple rhythms, simple lyrics, and fun, the sort of music you didn’t need to think about, or concentrate on, that didn’t ask anything of you, organic in the purest sense of the word. With Natalie, in less than twenty-four hours I could see she was beautiful but that she didn’t let that define her. She wasn’t brilliant, but she was sincere, and she was never going to try and be more than who she was. Sometimes simplicity can be serendipity; this was my chance at my John Cusack moment, and it made perfect sense.
So where do we go? And what should we do?
And why is the table set for two?
Is the answer in the question?
I didn’t decide to give myself to Natalie so much as it simply happened. A few days after meeting we set out on a road trip with two of her friends in the backseat. We had no real destination, just a purpose, which was to experience something different, away from the familiar that, truth be told, neither one of us was that familiar with yet. I let the road dictate our path and hours later, without intent, we ended up driving the streets of my adolescence. We passed my house, my high school, and the places I went when I needed a place to go. If she was disinterested in the entirety of everything she wasn’t showing it. Somewhere along the way she grabbed my hand and it felt like this was the first time a girl had ever touched me. I could see her friends were getting restless so I pulled into the parking lot of a bowling alley I used to frequent in middle school.
“Are we really going bowling?” her friend asked.
“Hell yeah we’re going bowling,” Natalie said, “And I’m going to kick his ass.”
“Oh really?” I asked, playing along, having had no real intent to bowl as much as I did to give the tired tires a rest.
“We should make this interesting though,” she said, “We should bet something.”
Her friends could read the situation better than I could, and they set out to find shoes.
“What do you want to bet?” I asked.
“If I win I get whatever I want.” Just getting to know her I had no idea what the spectrum of such a statement could entail. “And what about you?” she asked.
“How about a…kiss?” I answered.
I was at a loss for words before and after I spoke, but the fact was we hadn’t kissed yet, and I was fairly confident that limited as my bowling abilities were, I could still beat her.
“You’re on,” she said, smiling, “But I would have asked for more.”
The bowling alley was more or less empty with the exception of the four of us. With the first game half-over I realized that I was the only one trying; there were so many zeroes on the screen from the never-ending gutterballs that I worried I looked too desperate to win. This wasn’t lost on Natalie and her friends as they started ripping on me. Unintentionally, my slightly-better-than-mediocre play tanked and I stood a serious chance at losing. With the game, and my chance at kissing her on the line, I needed ten pins to win. My first ball went like a missile into the right gutter. The catcalls from behind me made it so I didn’t even want to turn around; I felt like a teenager again, playing baseball, the game on the line, two strikes against me, and the winning run on third. My entire life I’d been good in the clutch, but at this moment, I could feel my chances slipping away. My right palm was sweaty; it stuck to the ball when I grabbed it from the ball return. As I took my place in the center of the lead up to the lane, my knees shaking, I looked straight ahead into the center pin. I could hear the girls yelling behind me. I tried to focus on something, anything, from hot dogs, to puppies, to cherry Dilly Bars from Dairy Queen to erase the possibility, which I thought more than likely would become a reality, that if I failed I would never get to kiss Natalie. I took one deep breath after another, the ball getting heavy in my right hand. I tried to drown out the noise by thinking of MXPX’s song, “Undeniable.”
There’s a willingness that comes alive
When you begin tearing down the walls
But the first step is so very hard if you take a first step at all
I stepped forward and threw a rocket down the middle of the lane. The force of the ball exploded the pins into submission. After the audible crash there was complete silence behind me. I turned around. Their adopted cause defeated, her friends lost interest in heckling me, and ventured off towards the snack bar to devour overcooked nachos. Natalie was smiling. “You know you don’t have to pay up,” I said, “if you don’t want to.” I was serious, and by the tone of her response, a little too sad bastard. “Oh shut the hell up,” she said, walking up to me, pulling me by the chin to her level, and planting her lips on mine. Every cliché that literature, cinema, and music has come up with, from fireworks, to flashing stars, to oversized pounding hearts, to air horns going off, I heard and saw none of it. But I could feel my life change. Her lips were far softer and more sincere than I’d ever felt before and when she finally backed away, looking up to me, my stare said everything my voice couldn’t. “If I were you I would have asked for more,” she said after a quiet minute, before walking away and joining her friends at the snack bar.
The four of us spent the night in a hotel room, her friends sharing one bed, and Natalie and I sharing the other. We kissed several more times before she, like her friends before her, passed out. I lay beside her, her back against my side, the television flashing muted Star Trek scenes in the otherwise dark room. I couldn’t sleep; I just kept looking over at her, the lyrics to “Without You” running through my mind.
I got a confession to make
That my heart would break
To hear you say goodbye
You’re my every dream
You’re the threadwork to my seams
And you know that I can’t lie, when I sayI can’t stop thinking about you
It was ludicrous to think that I could feel so much for someone I met at a dance club the previous week. But the more I lay there and thought about it, the less it made sense to think too much about any of it. A little more than a year prior than that first night in bed with Natalie I was at a Barenaked Ladies concert and all I could think about was a way to get out, away from everything, from everyone I knew. Though that hotel was technically in my hometown I felt a thousand miles away. This is what college was supposed to be about. Taking chances. Stepping out of your comfort zone. Finding where you fit in. New beginnings. This is why I wanted to give college an honest chance in the first place. And as far as I could see, watching as Natalie lay silent, fast asleep, thinking of lyrics from an album that I started to think of as our album, the last thing I wanted whatever this thing was to be was an ever passing moment. I was going to do whatever I could to make this moment, this feeling last. Whatever the cost.
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