I survived my first year at college. It wasn’t without scars; after deciding to return, despite the debacle at the end of my first semester, not too far into the second one I fooled around and fell into credit card debt. I got blinded by a smile. It was a damn good smile, easy on the eyes, and easier on the knees. I fell hard, the closed-eyes heave of a half-dollar into a wishing well. As the months 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. One night, the last night of the second semester, the proverbial shit hit the fan. Things: words, insecurities, actual fans, were being thrown about by couples and singles alike. I took refuge outdoors, on the bench in front of the dorm. A girl, a casual friend of mine who lived upstairs, sat down beside me. She was beautiful, Kathy Ireland if Kathy Ireland didn’t only exist on calendars and in magazines; she had green eyes that would have drove Lo Pan from Big Trouble In Little China batty; looking into them, they drove me batty. Like a good pop song, her eyes could make you forget just about all of the ill-wills in your life. That night, on that bench, for me they did just that. We talked about just enough of nothing that 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 sort of something that shapes futures.
The next day everyone went their separate ways; people moved back home for the summer, to their childhood bedrooms and their jobs and their boyfriends. I moved across the street into an apartment. 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 didn’t know how to do 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. The one thing I learned early on was that freedom wasn’t about not having to wake up at 7:45 am anymore to get to Modern British Literature class on time; freedom was being able to strip down to your boxers immediately upon entering through your front door and not having to worry about picking up those pants until you 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. Then, within the course of two days, I had four of them. At 5 am I answered Girls Gone Wild and vacuum sealer infomercial calls. By 2 pm, I was cleaning the hallways of the Hampton Inn. At 8, I was washing dishes at Ponderosa. Somewhere in between I tore tickets at the movie theater. None of them paid particularly well, but they filled time. When I got out of work I was too exhausted to sleep; I’d cruise 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. In my few minutes of downtime I’d think of her, that smile: my wishing well. 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, and it was a mute effort to try and find a generator. 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 a friend 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 voice 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. My roommate, she said he 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 towards the house, a silhouette ran towards me. It was dark; all I could see were outlines. Right before impact I saw who the voice was: The girl, my friend with the eyes like pop songs, she reached out me and hugged me for all I was worth. Tired and grumpy, having tossed so many wheat pennies and Kennedy half-dollars down the wishing well of love, I didn’t feel like I was worth much anymore: “This was my dream, my wish, and I’m taking them back. I’m taking them all back.” But the smell of her hair, of her skin, exotic and new, it revitalized me; I felt vacuum-sealed, all fresh and new, good to go for months, or at least all-night. We talked until the sun came up. We stared at each other for what seemed like—and very well could have been—hours, each 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 my friend and I spent a good amount of time that summer at the campus library. We’d sit at the computer for hours and read up on world events, or at least get caught up on the box scores. Email was our lifeline to the outside world; a few days after the all-night talk I got one from the girl. She had returned home, back to reality and her boyfriend, and she was confused. She 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 tell me everything that she wanted to say, but she couldn’t. She wanted everything that she wanted to say 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 the next email, trying my best to freak out that I said something wrong, or stupid, or both. The next two emails were from a girl who, though we didn’t really know each other too well, from before the time we first met people thought we’d be kindred spirits. Both of us were thinkers—over-thinkers most of the time—and we both loved to write. She was mutual friends with the bright-eyed girl I was now in lust with, and she also just happened to be the ex-girlfriend of my friend and roommate. Her first email was a sort of catch up, telling me how her summer was going, the guy she was interested in, the guy sitting next to me that 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, they 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 words. 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 slap of the drum on the title song I was in love; I knew this album was going to change me. Before that afternoon, through all of the years since, you can count on one hand how many times I’ve felt that way about an album so quickly. Bleed American was one of them.
Every day brought another round of emails. Within the first couple days it was clear to me that the girl I was in lust with, she was in lust with me too, despite how much she wrote about wanting to try and work things out with her boyfriend if for no other reason—really, the only reason she mentioned— because of the time they had invested in each other. I could do without the boyfriend part, and the mortgage rate rationale she was using was lame, but everything else about the emails, how I’d feel after reading them, it was like a high; I got addicted. From a purely vain standpoint this girl was beautiful, hot even, a catch all of my friends would be jealous of, and yeah, the prospect of that coming becoming reality meant something to me. Not everything, but something. And it 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. 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 my other friend, the kindred spirit. We 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 at Ms. Green Eyes. 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 her. 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 someone had it covered. Convinced it was her I swung the door open. It was my ex-girlfriend. My heart dropped; the room fell silent; everyone sitting behind me could see through me, the look on my face. I hadn’t really thought of her much that summer but just like, there she was, and just like that, the feelings started coming back. 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 said, giving in to the hug. She asked how my summer was, what I had been up to. I gave her one-word answers, trying my best to be rude without making it seem like I was being rude. I started looking over my shoulder, worried that the girl I really wanted to be sitting on my bed with would walk in, see me sitting there with someone else, and leave; a half-summer worth of work and excitement, uneventfully destroyed, like a limp 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, neither missing the opportunity to rub each other’s nose in their mistake. I could see the floodgates threatening to open again; I was trying my best to keep them at bay. I didn’t want to still love her; I was better than that, but it was a hard fight. I could hear “Your House” playing from the other room. It was poetic injustice, but it fit. 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 the she was standing there; the one I was waiting for. 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 for a minute I was right back to being the guy behind all of those emails. We sat on my bed and looked 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—that I’d been dreaming of since I first saw her, since the moment we first sat together on that bench all of those months before, it was the worst kiss of my life. We spent the night together; after all of the things we shared in between our last face-to-face, everything short of saying, “I love you” to each other, we thought we owed each other as much. But it was a disaster.
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 full of standout pop songs, and that night it was enough to help me to put everything in perspective. Hope is a powerful emotion to harness, and for a while there, my hope was gone. I’d given up on love, and I was pretty sure it had given up on me. She 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, if I gave it an honest chance.
“Are you listening? Wooooooooah!”
A month later the girl 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, Woooooooooooah!”
I was spinning free, with a sweet and simple numbing me all over again.
