I was in one of those bloated rubber Sumo suits the first time I saw her. There were dozens of people watching my roommate and I make fools of ourselves as we bashed into each other with a reckless abandon, trying our best to fend off laughter long enough to knock each other on their inflated ass. But once I saw her everything stopped; the periphery surrounding her was like mosaic blur. Her hair was jet black, her skin pale. She was wearing torn blue jeans and a black sweater. She had a lip ring that shined like a sniper’s scope right before they fire and you die. Her eyes were brown the way the girl behind Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” must have been. Gasping for air, wiping the stream of sweat from the rubber pony-tail strapped to my head, for the first time in my life I knew I was in love.
After shedding the suit, from opposite sides of the room we stared at each other in embarrassed intervals, only looking away long enough to try and convince the other that we hadn’t caught the other looking. She’d whisper things to her three friends who were standing beside her, and I’d lean over and say something to my friends who were standing next to me. It was an obvious game of attrition, like some sixth-grade dance minus “Bust a Move” and the bowl of fruit punch. I was waiting for a concrete signal from her to approach, and she was awaiting the same from me. Both supporting casts of friends were encouraging us to no avail. When her friends finally tired of her lack of courage, and saw this waiting game for what it was worth—completely futile—they turned to leave. My friends and I followed just far enough behind to not look like the stalkers we were trying to be. The January air was a punch-in-the-gut cold, and we followed them until they veered towards the opposite end of the campus from where we were going. I tried to convince my friends to continue with the detective work but they weren’t having anything of it. It was too cold, and as one of them pointed out, freezing our asses off even more wouldn’t change the fact that I was being a pussy.
In the ensuing weeks I saw her and her friends all over campus, and each time it was exactly more of the silent same. I’d try and get a table in the cafeteria close enough to her with the hopes that she’d finally end the stalemate and say hello. If my friends and I were seated first, she’d do the same. One of her friends was even in a class of mine, and I sat closer to her than I had before I knew—at least hypothetically speaking—who she was in hopes that she’d give me the scoop on her friend. But that too was fruitless. To my friends the girl was referred to as, “the girl from the UC” and almost every day I gave my friends updates; where I saw her, what she was wearing, how I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. Not long after that night I first saw “the girl from the UC”, I started dating a girl that I found enough false courage to talk to. But it didn’t change the feeling I got whenever “the girl from the UC” crossed my path; I may have been riding shotgun in a Ford, but I had my mind of driving a Ferrari.
That summer, one night when driving back from the campus library, I saw “the girl from the UC” alone, walking across the lawn towards the apartment complex opposite of where I lived. It was my chance, my silver platter; the sun was just starting to set and the sky looked prophetic; that time of night where one stranger asking another stranger if they wanted a ride would still be seen more of a romantic gesture than a creeper one, and there wasn’t the added pressure of both her and I having a cast of “Just do it” friends pestering us. I allowed my foot to come off the gas paddle and coasted at a pace I thought would be inviting. It wasn’t. She noticed me noticing her and I got scared. I stepped on the gas and tried not to look back, though I looked back all of the way until she was out of my sight.
Fast forward almost two calendar years to one day, while walking towards the sales floor after punching in, I walked passed “the girl from the UC” in the tight hallway of the backroom of work. She was halfway through slipping her blue vest over her right arm when we noticed each other. Both of our eyes ballooned, but we kept walking, perhaps out of fear that proximity might finally force one of us to grow a pair. When I got to my place behind the counter I kept repeating, “Holy sh!t” over and over to myself until the girl I worked with asked, “What?” I managed to say, “My dream girl works here,” in stuttered intervals. It took her to put my stutters together but once she realized what I said she asked, “Who?” And I couldn’t answer. In two years of watching from a distance I never got close enough to get her name. After calming myself down I did a recon mission around the store to try and find out which department she worked in. When I saw her standing amongst a pile of unfolded clothes, I bee-lined for the backroom and looked over the expanse of the alphabetized work schedule that took up a good chunk of the wall. I scanned through names, eliminating ones I knew, or ones who didn’t work in her department. I whittled it down to three potential names, and checked that against who was currently on the clock. The easiest way to get a concrete confirmation would have been to ask someone that worked with her. But the place was like a giant high school; if someone knew that you liked someone, everyone knew it, and you could never control either the momentum or what was said by the time it reached its destination. The wall gave me a name that I was pretty sure was hers. But I did nothing with it.
One night a bunch of employees were gathering for the nightly team meeting. I sat down on a bench and planted my head against the wall. The night meetings were always pointless; self-important managers going over sales figures that nobody in their early-twenties gave a damn about. One of the elder ladies who worked nights sat beside me on the bench. Before even saying, “Hello” to me she said, “I know someone that likes you.” I felt eight-years old again. In the month or so prior I’d hung out with numerous girls who worked at the store, and a couple of them were interested enough in me to the point where I had to use lies on them to keep them away: “I’m moving soon” or “I really don’t want a relationship right now” were a couple of standbys, and for the most part they worked. “Aren’t you going to ask me who?” the lady asked. Without hesitation I said, “No.” If it was who I thought it was, a girl that my excuses weren’t working on, I really didn’t want to know. “But she reeeeeeeally likes you,” she said. “Like reeeeeeeeeally likes you.” “Ok, who?” I asked, more to get her to shut up. “Liz,” she answered. My stomach dropped; I felt like I’d just sped down the monster hill on a roller coaster with nothing securing me. I bit my lip hard enough to where I could taste the iron of my blood slip down on my tongue. “Liz?” I asked. “Yep,” she said. When she asked, “Do you like her?” I was too dumbstruck to be dishonest. “The girl from the UC…she’s my dream girl.”
I spent the next couple of days thinking of something to say to Liz. My entire life I was never much of a talker, and on top of that, I’d never been confused with a smooth talker. Pretty much every girl that I ever dated, it started off by the girl revealing her interest in me, and for better or worse, me saying some variation of, “Sure” in response. The biggest reason I hadn’t pursued “the girl from the UC” long before I found out by process of elimination that her name was Liz was because I was afraid of rejection on that colossal of a scale; if she said, “No” to me it would be worse than getting dumped, or fired, or some tangible thing that you’re probably going to be no worse for wear after it happens; it would be the utter annihilation of a dream; and not just any dream, but the sort of dream that when it dies, part of you that can never be reclaimed dies with it: hope. Two years prior I had come to grips with this rationale and accepted it for what it was, even if that line of thinking happened to by synonymous with stupidity. It would be easier for me to never know if she liked me than to know that she didn’t. But now that I had confirmation that she did indeed like me, I was lost. I had the campus sealed validation of two accredited universities to prove that I had some proficiency with the written word, but when it came to writing something that would reveal my pent-up feelings for Liz, I just couldn’t do it; it felt like trying to learn how to walk for the first time, only I had Weeble-Wobbles for feet. Finally, after days of pep-talking myself and tearing sheets of half-written letters out of my notebook that just weren’t good/honest/compelling enough, I took the one hundred and thirty-two steps over to where she happened to be standing at work. As I approached, she turned and walked a few feet the other way before stopping at a rack of jeans. “Hey,” I said. “Hey,” she replied. After seven-hundred-plus days of silent intrigue the ice was broken. I slipped my way through the sloppy semblance of a conversation before I finally spit out, “Do you want to hang out tonight?” “Sure,” she said. “Ok,” I said, and turned to walk away. When I got about five feet away I stopped, realizing that I’d never introduced myself. “I know who you are,” she said. I smiled. “I’m Liz,” she said to which I answered, “I know who you are too.”
I’ve never won the lottery, but I assume that there’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for it once it actually happens. I had about an hour before I got home from work to when she was supposed to come over. I cleaned my room, did the dishes, and even vacuumed every rug in the house. When my roommates asked what the hell got into me I told them that “the girl from the UC” was coming over. They were just as shocked as I was; I finally had grown a pair. When she finally arrived I made brief introductions and then we went into my room. She took a seat on the floor while I sat on the bed. We fumbled our way for a while until the tension was so thick I could see both of us starting to suffocate. “What do you want to listen to?” I asked. “Anything works for me.”
I grabbed the first disk I saw, Wiretap Scars by Sparta, and popped it in the CD player. “This sounds like the guy from At the Drive-In,” she said. “It is,” I answered, and knew in one instant that my first premonition two years prior was correct; I was in love with this girl. There’s that scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack’s character Rob is talking about first meeting a girl and he says, “I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films; these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth.” As far as I was concerned that’s the spot-on gospel. When dating a girl it’s easy to look beyond something such as she hates to wake up before 7 a.m., or even that she’s a vegetarian when you like to eat meat. But when you come across someone who thinks Pearl Harbor was a good movie, or thinks that Nickelback a) has musical merit b) is hard rock c) is good, you’re going to have a rough, if not impossible, go at it. With Liz, right away, I could see I wouldn’t have to deal with that; the mere mention of At the Drive-In was as sexy as anything Victoria’s Secret ever produced. “Air,” the second song off Sparta’s Wiretap Scars has the line, “What would the oddsmakers say?” I didn’t know what the oddsmakers would say—until we put on the album I didn’t know what I was going to say—but once the ball got rolling even I couldn’t believe the odds of how similar we were.
We both liked Ani Difranco and Fiona Apple. We loved John Cusack movies and thought him holding the radio over his head in Say Anything was about the most romantic thing of our generation. She was an art major that loved to read; I was a writing major who loved art. We both loved Knorr’s Spanish Rice, hated our job, and liked to fall asleep with the TV on. I was from Rochester, NY and she grew up just south of there. When she asked me what my birthday was and I told her, she said, “Shut up!” and demanded my driver’s license. Wouldn’t you know it; we had the same birthday.
Wiretap Scars was an album I had purchased just a few weeks prior to that night with Liz, and I hadn’t really given it a spin yet. But immediately I loved it. Sparta’s debut is more accessible than At the Drive-In’s catalog. Whether or not that made it better or worse didn’t matter; Sparta was different, and they had a sound that was perfect for two people who had waited two years to have this conversation. There’s a sense of urgency in Jim Ward’s voice on Wiretap Scars but it’s never overwhelming, and his guitar work is hypnotic, even when it gets chaotic. But you’re more likely to get lost in the songs than buried in the sound. Liz and I were enamored with songs such as “Cataract” and “Glasshouse Tarot” right away. Every time our conversation would approach the natural transition to the next topic we’d relax for a minute and listen.
“Light Burns Clear” opens with the couplet, “Looking back with perfect symmetry/Mistakes were you, mistakes were me” and talking over that line with Liz, we had another starting point to get back to the starting point we both clearly remembered. I shared my stories of “the girl from the UC” with the Girl from the UC, and she told her tales of “the Turquoise Ring Guy.” Every instance I mentioned of seeing her, of passing by in my car, or her running by my dorm, she told me what that exact story looked like through her eyes. For years we were both looking in the same mirror, we both saw the same thing, but we couldn’t stop staring long enough to say something. Wiretap Scars was helping to push us in that direction.
We didn’t go to sleep that night. We listened to countless albums in their entirety but every other listen we’d come back to Wiretap Scars and listen again. After covering a lifetime worth of memories in those first few hours, in a moment of silence while Liz and I were lying beside each other she asked me, “Why didn’t you talk to two years ago?” I could feel the pain behind her voice, the ramifications of what she was asking. The first two years in college are another lifetime unto itself where mistakes and misfortunes multiple like sea monkeys. As I let the question linger I thought of what heartache, and scars, and failed relationships she might be referring to. Then I thought of myself, my own scars, and how I’d more or less discarded hope the way that people discard chewed gum before that lady said, “I know someone that likes you” to me. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her the same question but I didn’t; the song “Collapse,” which has since become one of my ten favorite songs of all-time, said things perfectly:
“The host had his mouth sewn shut
All in the name of trust
When the blood goes thin, he’s given in
You can spare us the formal toast
The drunken anecdotes
From this day on…goes on and on…”
Whoever either one of us, what we did or didn’t do before this conversation, we weren’t going to be able to change that, for better or worse, and if we were going to have the sort of bright future both of us knew from the moment we first locked eyes on each other, we were going to have to look beyond the past, the heartaches and failures, and look only to each other. Only this time without fear of failure.
A couple months after our first night together we went to see Sparta in Cleveland. It was the first real concert I’d been to in three years, and it was the first concert I’d been to with a girlfriend where I didn’t have to worry about whether or not they were having a good time or enjoying the music. We were both there because of the music, because we both loved it. It only made it better that we both loved each other. When Sparta played “Collapse” live I looked over at her and she was looking at me; it was one of those scenes, one of those moments that Cameron Crowe invariably turns into an “Awwwww”/Why can’t that happen to me moments in every movie he writes/directs. For the first time in my life I felt like I had a solid foundation, one which I could build something off of, and I had someone that, no matter what direction I wanted to go in, she’d be along for the ride.
