Bleed American – Jimmy Eat World
When you stop paying attention to time you lose all concept of it. My first year at Edinboro was nearing an end. The suddenness didn’t hit me until I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall, still a few days to go, half-asleep, half-listening to my Traditional Grammar professor drone on and on about something I was going to have to buckle down and pay attention the following school year when I’d have to retake the class. Overall, despite failing my first class since Course II Math in 10th grade, my GPA was respectable, I was writing again, and more importantly, I’d managed to prove to myself that I could survive away from home.
I had secured an off-campus apartment for the summer. It was a move of only a couple hundred yards from my dorm but I still had to pack. Staring at my possessions—unlike a few months prior when things fell apart with Ellen and I packed with the intention of never coming back—they didn’t look like much: clothes, books, technology, some pictures of me from a past that seemed lived by a different person. It was uninspiring at best, and when my roommate John asked if I wanted to join him for lunch I couldn’t jump faster at the opportunity to get away from three-by-five inch sets of eyes that I didn’t know anymore.
“So what about this party tonight?” he asked.
“Should be fun,” I answered, staring at my tator tots.
“So are things good with Natalie?”
“Define good,” I answered.
“Are you screwing her again?”
“No.”
“Then things aren’t good.”
With that I looked up at John and smiled. In many ways John was like a dog; a dog might piss in the corner every once in a while, or take a dump in the middle of the carpet, but they always have the best intentions at heart, are forever loyal, and try their best to make you happy. I had many good guy friends growing up but I never had a brother, someone that I shared a room with, argued with for hours about sports teams, got in musical preference tiffs with. In that sense John had become like a brother to me. In the beginning I didn’t know how much John and I could have in common; he loved country music and living in the past, recounting high school tales at the drop of a dime that I had no frame of reference for. But he had grown on me considerably once I gave him an honest chance. At this lunch, like so many times this past semester, he wasn’t going to let me walk off without remembering life’s most important lesson according to John: No matter what your love life is it doesn’t suck as bad as mine. It was true; early in the semester, to a girl who had stated her interest in John, with a straight face, in a serious tone he asked her, “Am I going to need my goggles and a weedwhacker when I venture down yonder?” That night was the last of her interest in John; it wasn’t that he was ignorant, he was just clueless. But that said, he wasn’t above playing the role of the dunce if it made you laugh.
The truth was I had forgiven Natalie. One night I was looking down from my second-story window and she was standing below, outside the dorm, smoking. It was the same look, from the same position, that I had been ignoring for weeks. But that night, I just couldn’t do it anymore. She motioned me to come downstairs and I did. The first thing she said to me was, “I have something for you.” Before I could ask what it was she reached into her purse and handed me a Symphony milk chocolate bar. I had revealed my admiration for said chocolate in a passing conversation on one of our aimless drives. Looking at the bar I couldn’t remember which conversation or ride it was from, but I was floored that she remembered such a disposable detail. I’d been given awesome presents by numerous girls in the past: tickets to see Bob Dylan, scratch off lottery tickets that netted me $300, a live on-the-air singing of some sappy Selena song on Valentine’s Day, but none of them felt as grand and heartfelt as that simple chocolate bar in my hand. Natalie grabbed a hold of me and gave me an all-encompassing hug. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” she said, leaning back so she could look in my eyes. And I was sorry too. Whether or not I felt betrayed by her after our trip to New York City—which I still did—love was a stubborn wound that refused to heal, and looking at her that night, I knew I wasn’t done picking at it.
When John and I returned to our dorm room and opened the door his parents were sitting side-by-side on his bed, both white in the face, 2 Live Crew’s “Face Down, Ass Up” playing n the background.
“That’s an…interesting song,” John’s mother, a high-school English teacher, said.
“It’s his,” John yelled, as he lunged across the room to silence the song. “And so are the condoms in my closet, and the dirty movies. He was ashamed of his parents finding them so he had me stash them for him.”
As well as John meant, he also wasn’t above telling a thousand tale-tales or throwing you in front of a Greyhound to stave off embarrassment.
“Nice to finally meet you,” his father, a high school Principal said to me, standing and extending his hand.
This visit was completely unexpected and couldn’t end fast enough. The knock on the door behind me was a welcome explosion in the otherwise deafening silent room. I opened the door to find Erica, a friend of mine, standing there. “Can I borrow you for a few minutes?” she asked. I was all too eager to oblige, saying goodbye to John’s parents, before following Erica down the hall. “Can you buy me some booze for tonight?” she asked. It was a question often asked of me. As the only one of legal age among my friends, I was the go-to whenever someone wanted to drink. It was the first of many trips to the liquor store or the beer distributor I’d make that evening, more or less just exchanging the person in the passenger seat for whoever was next. The majority of passengers with me that night were more or less in the same transitional state that I was, teetering somewhere between being in love, and at any given moment just as likely to consider driving off a cliff because of it. Just when I thought my ferrying duties were complete, Lynn, a casual friend of mine who lived upstairs, asked if she could get a ride. Lynn was beautiful; Kathy Ireland if Kathy Ireland didn’t only exist on posters and calendars. She had green eyes that would have driven Lo Pan from Big Trouble In Little China batty. I tried my best to remind myself of Natalie, but it was hard to look away from them. When we got back to the dorm and she exited the car I was almost relieved when she walked away, content with the promise that we’d talk more later, overwhelmed with the feeling that I had just somehow cheated on Natalie even though we were no longer together.
In the blink of an eye all of the alcohol was gone, consumed in one non-stop shot. The floors of our dorm rooms were full of fallen glass and tin soldiers, and the battle ground was set. What started as an innocent toss of a half-eaten sausage slice in one person’s room ended in complete carnage, encompassing just about every student on all three floors. Furniture, fans, and two semesters worth of insecurities plastered the halls. I tried retreating to different rooms but the hysteria was everywhere: petty arguments, fistfights, people bawling. I’d consciously tried to avoid Natalie that day but when I opened the door to the stairwell I collided into her. Without a word she tried to kiss me. I pushed her away. Since we got back from New York City I had badly wanted her to kiss me, but drunk as I was, everything that I couldn’t confess to her sober about feeling betrayed, and pissed, and hurt, and heartbroken finally came out in one vile free-verse, stream-of-consciousness rant. By the time I finished, worked up and worn out, I couldn’t even look her in her tear-stained eyes. I took the steps down two-at-a-time and let out a Judd Nelson The Breakfast Club-like “Fuck You!” scream as I opened the door to outside.
I exhaled for the first time in minutes, inhaling the sweetness of silence. It took me a minute to make out the sound of laughter. I tracked down where it was coming from.
“I love that movie,” Lynn said, sitting on a bench in front of the dorm, a plastic bottle full of whatever on her lap. “Sit down,” she said, pausing to hiccup, “and take a load off.
We sat in what was more or less silence for what could have been five minutes or forever, and whether it was the cool springtime breeze, or the suddenness of seeing Lynn, I started to feel sober for the first time in months. When she walked away I had this overwhelming urge that if I could have just said one more thing to her it would have really been something.
The next day the semester was officially over and everyone went their separate ways; people moved back home for the summer, to their childhood bedrooms and boyfriends, and I moved across the street. For the first time in my life I was on my own. I had to grocery shop, and cook. I had to dust, and do laundry. I was unprepared for most of it; when I attempted to grocery shop, my cart looked like a game of Go Fish gone array; no two things made sense together. But I was free. Free from having to wake up at 7:45 am to get to Modern British Literature class on time. Free to strip down to my boxers immediately upon entering my apartment and not having to worry about picking up my pants until I needed to wear them again. The first couple of weeks were an adjustment period. I didn’t have cable: I had eleven DVDs, a few dozen VHS tapes, a couple hundred CDs, and shelves full of books I was finally going to get the chance to read.
At first I couldn’t find a job. Because of my relationship with Natalie, I fooled around and fell into credit card debt; my faith in her, in us, a closed-eye heave of a half-dollar into a wishing well. As those months with her went by I kept on wishing. It got expensive; I was investing more than I could afford. But the deeper I got, the more I thought she’d come around. I never realized that love is like buying real estate; for every looks-too-good-to-be-true tale turned favorable there are dozens of paved-over Poltergeist realities. The deeper into it you get, the harder you’ll try to dig yourself out, ignoring the fact that shovels don’t do much good in quicksand. Before long, however, I found myself with four jobs . At 5 a.m. I answered Girls Gone Wild and vacuum sealer infomercial calls at a national call center. By 2 p.m., I was cleaning the hallways of the Hampton Inn. At 8 p.m., I was washing dishes at Ponderosa. Somewhere in between I tore tickets at the movie theater. None of them paid particularly well, but something was better than nothing, and they filled time. When I got out of work I was too exhausted to sleep; I’d drive along Lake Erie and look out into the vast expanse of the dark water. When I’d finally get tired, I’d head back home and pass out. A couple hours later I’d wake up and do it all over again. That sense of false sobriety at the end of the school year was gone; absence only made me think of Natalie. I didn’t hear much from her, but the few words that she wrote me, I clung to them like static electricity. I knew the power was out—I was in fact the one who flipped the switch—but I couldn’t help myself. In matters of the heart, until I had something new, she was everything I had.
Halfway through the summer I got an email from my friend Pat saying that he was bored at home, that he couldn’t stand the monotony of being in a town where time had passed him by. I told him to come live with me. It meant having to give up toiling in my boxers, but it would be nice to have the company.
One night I got home from work and the phone was ringing. On the other end was a female voice that I knew, but couldn’t quite place. I tried to play coy, pretend that I knew who she was. Technically I did, just not right then. She told me that she was at a party, that I should come. She said Pat was already there. I heard him in the background yell, “Come on you bitch!” I said ok, I’d be there in a few. When I walked toward the house, a silhouette ran toward me. It was dark and all that I could see were outlines. Right before impact the mosaic became clear. It was Lynn, Ms. Kathy Ireland come true. Tired and grumpy as I was, as she hugged me, the smell of her hair, of her skin, exotic and new, it revitalized me; I felt vacuum-sealed, good to go for months, or at least all-night. We walked together into the party but remained only for a few minutes, until the noise became a distraction. We retreated to my car, drove off to some parking lot, and talked until the sun came up. We stared at each other, each seemingly looking for the other to make the first move. That morning ended just as the night hours before had begun, with a hug; nothing more, and nothing less.
Short on air conditioning and heavy with perspiration Pat and I spent a good amount of time that summer in the campus library. We’d sit at the computer and get caught up on the box scores of the games we didn’t watch. Email was our lifeline to the outside world. A few days after the all-night talk I received one from Lynn. She had returned home, back to reality and her boyfriend, and she was confused. Lynn and her boyfriend were having problems—serious problems—and I, through our conversation, had helped open her eyes to the fact that some things needed to change if she was going to be happy. Her email told me that I really made her happy, and because of that, she was sad. She wanted to say more, but she couldn’t, she didn’t know how. She said she wanted everything to come out perfect, but she knew it wouldn’t. None of it mattered; as confused as she was, as confused as her email made me, I was in serious lust. I wrote her back quickly before I had time to over-think what I was saying. I hit the Send button and went on to reading the next email, trying my best not to freak out over the extent of my level of honesty. The next two emails were from Emily, a girl who, though we didn’t really know each other too well, from before the time we were first introduced people thought we’d be kindred spirits. Both Emily and I were thinkers—over-thinkers most of the time—and we both loved to write. She was good friends with Lynn, and she also just happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Pat. Emily’s first email was a sort of catch up, telling me how her summer was going, about the guy she was interested in now, and about Dan, who she was interested in finally getting over. The second email was the lyrics to a song, “Your House” by Jimmy Eat World. I had briefly backed into Jimmy Eat World’s music in high school but not hard enough for it to stick. But as I read over the lyrics I knew this was a song I had to hear:
“Well, I throw away everything I’ve written you, oh
Anything to just keep my mind from thinking
How I had you once, oh, I can’t forget that
Sometimes I wish I could lose you again.
You’re winning me over
With everything you say
You rip my heart right out, you rip my heart right out
When I let you closer, I only want you closer
You rip my heart right out.”
Good pop songs are like good lovers; they change you. The only real difference is that good pop songs last a lifetime where good lovers tend to come with expiration dates. A good lover will make you remember every mistake you’ve ever made with the last good lover you had. A good pop song, if you let it be, it’s like a time machine; it’ll rewrite the history you’ve tried so hard to forget. Though I hadn’t physically heard it yet I already knew “Your House” was a good pop song; I knew exactly what this dude had gone through by reading the lyrics. The “Sometimes I wish I could lose you again” slayed me; a tad Whoa is me or not, this was brutal and brilliant and honest. The next day I went to Best Buy and bought Bleed American and from the first beat of the title song opener I was in love. I knew this album was going to change me. In my first twenty-two years and through all of the years since, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve felt that way about an album so quickly. Bleed American was one of them.
In my rushed honesty in that first reply to Lynn I had apparently said enough to warrant a follow up. She ended her response email with, “By the way are you by any chance the man on the moon, I have always envisioned the man on the moon to be the most perfect man in the world and I am beginning to think that I have met him.” It was clear to me Lynn was in lust with me too. I was a stupid smiling mess after that, so much so that as the daily email exchange carried on I ignored how she wrote about wanting to try and work things out with her boyfriend. The only reason she gave was because of the time they had invested in each other. Through the screen I could tell that the mortgage rate rationale she was using was lame, but everything else about her emails, how I’d feel after reading them, it was like a high; I got addicted. From a pure vanity standpoint this girl was beautiful, hot even, a catch all of my friends would be jealous of, and yeah, the prospect of that becoming a reality in my life, her on my arm, meant something to me. Not everything, but something. And her emails boosted my self-esteem; I might have been completely inept at buying groceries and mixing whites and colored laundry, but damn, a hot girl liked me enough to refer to me as “The Man On The Moon.” I’d listen to “A Praise Chorus” and think of her, of the possibilities:
“I’m on my feet, I’m on the floor, I’m good to go.
Well all I need is just to hear a song I know.
I wanna always feel like part of this was mine.
I wanna to fall in love tonight.”
After listening to “A Praise Chorus” the prospect of love seemed redeeming again. Somehow the song made the world seem smaller, easier to navigate. It’s refreshing, the way good pop songs are like the gunshot to start a race; from the opening BANG! its game on, balls-to-the-wall fun; it’s almost like getting the chance to be naïve again each time you listen, before life starting bringing you lemons, and “It’s not you, it’s me” endearments.
The last email I’d read each day was from Emily, who I was realizing could just be a kindred spirit. Unlike with Lynn where by then we were maybe, sort of, hypothesizing about a future, Emily and I would share stories of our past failures, we’d trade obscure quotes, we wouldn’t try to dance around the things or subjects that seemingly everyone else in our lives all too quickly wanted to dance around. We could talk about a song like “If You Don’t, Don’t” with lines such as, “And I’m sorry that I’m such a mess/I drank all my money could get/I took everything you let me have/And then I never loved you back,” and without saying too much we knew that lines like these were meant for people like us; we weren’t the ones writing these songs, we were the ones a song like this was being written about. There’s a certain bond with people of this disposition, whether it’s that misery loves company, the fact that you’re perpetual sad bastards, or something else. Her emails always left me feeling smarter; I’d always walk away with the urge to write, or read, or sift through volumes of famous quotations to try and find one she’d get a kick out of.
As the summer bore to a close the anticipation was reaching a climax; it looked more and more like I’d get a shot with Lynn as weeks prior she had stopped mentioning her boyfriend all together. I organized a giant “Welcome Back” party the night everyone was moving back to school. Really, I was just using the party as an excuse to see Lynn. Everyone at the party could see my excitement. Every time someone knocked at the door I’d hurdle people to open it. One knock, I ran over, and went to peek out the peep hole but a hand had it covered. Convinced it was Lynn I swung the door open. It was Natalie. My heart dropped; the room fell silent; everyone sitting behind me could see through me, the look on my face. With the conversations between Lynn and Emily, I hadn’t really thought of Natalie much late in the summer. But there she was, and just like that, I could feel the lump wedging its way back into my throat. We went into my room and sat down on the bed. “I missed you,” she said, and leaned in to hug me. “I missed you too,” I answered, giving in to the hug. But fear washed over me. I started looking over my shoulder, worried that the Lynn would walk in, see me sitting there with Natalie, and leave; a half-summer’s worth of work and excitement, uneventfully destroyed, like a dud bottle rocket. “Did you listen to any good music this summer?” she asked. “Yeah,” I answered, “Jimmy Eat World.” “Ah,” she said, “they suck.”
Her answer was the perfect summation of everything that had happened between us, our relationship. The things I liked the most, she didn’t. The music I really loved, she hated. We would try to make compromises with each other but they only lasted so long; we were like two dogs who kept crapping on each other’s carpet; it wasn’t necessarily the other person’s fault, just bad training. I didn’t want to still love her; I was better than that. Looking at her was hard though—she was still beautiful—so I looked away instead. I could hear “Your House” playing from the other room. It was poetic injustice, but it fit. Sure that the purpose of her visit was to re-anchor herself in my heart I said just enough to make the silence uncomfortable. When she realized I wasn’t going to bite she left a couple minutes later, one last hug to make up for a summer void of them. When I walked out of my room Lynn was sitting on the couch. I missed her entrance; she missed the excitement I’d been wearing on my face for a month and a half, which I promised her would be there. She looked good, damn good, and in a millisecond I was right back to being the guy behind all of those emails. After faking a supporting role in the room’s conversation Lynn and I retreated to my bedroom, and sat at the foot of my bed, looking at everything but each other. After we couldn’t avoid it anymore I took her hand, leaned in, and kissed her. This girl—this goddess who could melt the knees of whatever guy she looked at—the same girl I’d been dreaming of all summer, since the moment we sat together on that bench all of those months before, I was finally kissing her, and it was the worst kiss of my life.
I tried my best to kiss my way through the letdown. I even upped the ante by undressing Lynn, hoping the sight of her naked would somehow right the sinking ship. She looked every bit as breathtaking as I’d imagined she would. But even that was futile. Lying in bed beside her that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stared into the ceiling, looking for shapes or patterns that I could make something out of, something to distract me. But the ceiling was eggshell white, nothing else, and this situation was like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet holding anyone but each other as the Titanic sank.
The night after, I sat on my floor and listened to “My Sundown,” Bleed American’s closer, for a solid hour, over and over, trying to make peace with the failure.
“Good, goodbye, lovely time
Good, goodbye, tin sunshine
Good, goodbye, I’ll be fine
Good, goodbye, good, goodnight.”
The song is a perfect ending to a near-perfect album, and that night time stood still enough for me to write everything into perspective. Hope is a powerful emotion to harness, and for a while there, my hope was gone. Lynn helped me regain a sense of worth; a modicum of pride in myself, that I would have something to offer someone of the opposite sex, who hopefully would feel the same way about me. I thought that person would be Lynn but I learned that lips never lie, as beautiful as the person wearing them might be, and you can’t choose which eyes to lose yourself in.
“If you’re listening?” Jim Adkins sings in “Sweetness.” “Woah, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!”
A few weeks later Emily, who’d sent me the song lyrics for “Your House” in the first of many eye-opening emails that summer, she opened my eyes to one more thing; the fact that she liked me.
“Sing it back, Woah, oh, oh, oh, oh!”
Yeah, stumble til you crawl. Sinking into sweet uncertainty.
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