Entry 9: Room For Squares – John Mayer

When you’re a kid time has a way of passing with the speed and urgency of an elderly turtle with four broken legs on his way to visit his proctologist.  Important events—Christmas, your birthday, the end of the school day—always seem forever fleeting, forever away.  In fact, “This is taking forever” seems to be right up there in the adolescent lexicon with other standbys such as “I hate this” and “This sucks.”  Patient, kids of the wayfaring world are not; the journey for all intents and purposes hasn’t been invented yet, and even if it has it’s just an annoying means to get to what really matters: The finish line.  You don’t and can’t appreciate the process because you’ve always got your eye on the prize.  Studying for the test, the day-long car-ride to get to Cedar Point, writing letters to the girl in hopes she’ll first circle “Yes” and then somewhere down the line take her clothes off for you, they are just necessary evils; if life could be like a DVD everybody at that age would just skip to the “good” parts and say screw off the build-up.

I don’t know the age when that changes, when the second hand of life’s clock finds crack and gets addicted to speeding everything up on you.  But it happens.  Life turns into an hourglass and the more you try and slow things down the quicker the sand disappears and the conversation, or embrace, or night you’ve waited a lifetime for goes cold in your arms; turned from touchable to a tale you’ll end up telling over and over because it’s the only thing that can make you feel close to that moment again.

By the time I got to Edinboro I already had two-and-a-half years-worth of community college in tow.  Those two-and-a-half years took a total of almost four calendar years to get through, and they felt every bit of it.  But the two years it took me to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree at Edinboro flew by.  What seemed like an eternity in the making, before I knew it I went from carrying my things into the dorm, hot girl wearing a black thong in see-through pants on the stairs in front of me, to waiting for hours in a sweltering gymnasium to hear someone call my name in congratulations, hand me my quasi-diploma, immediately drive back to my apartment, carry my things out to my car, a fat woman with fat-lady underwear pushing out the top of her jeans in front of me, so I could move a quarter-mile down the street into an apartment with three friends to start the unabashed Summer of Justin.

Officially, I was an adult.  I was twenty-three and a two-time college graduate.  I never thought much about the future, but I suppose in the back of my mind I assumed it would be bright.  Growing up the people who are put there to help guide you through your formative years say things such as, “The sky’s the limit” and “If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything” and I was still buying in to what they had sold me.  There’s a danger in using such vague terms on daydreamers who see the world in such vague colors.  But I wasn’t there yet.  Enough people asked me, “What’s next?” at my graduation party a few week later and I more or less told the lot of them that I was keeping my options open.  I wanted to write.  I might want to teach writing.  Most of all I wanted to experience life a bit more, see what else it had in store for me.  I wanted to find some inspiration.  And I meant all of it.

I’d wake up early and go to bed late.  Two of my roommates worked at a restaurant and would bring us home buckets of chicken wings that we’d eat after a long night of drinking.  When we weren’t at the bars we were sitting on our living room floor or on our balcony looking deep into the nothingness of shrubs and bushes and trees that smelled like cum, talking about everything and nothing in particular.  I listened to a lot of music that summer.  I was down to one job, and a big part of that job was stocking CDs.  I’d spend most of my shifts thumbing through them.  Some of the more interesting CDs I’d set aside and when it came around to payday I’d buy as many as I could afford.  One of the ones I bought early that summer was John Mayer’s Room For Squares.  He had one song, “No Such Thing” on the radio and more were soon to come.  The first time I heard “No Such Thing” I heard the voice of a man who sounded to be at about the same time and disposition of life as I was:

“Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings

and the drama queens

I’d like to think the best of me

is still hiding up my sleeve

They love to tell you, “Stay inside the lines”

but something’s better on the other side

I want to run through the halls of my high school

I want to scream at the top of my lungs

I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world

just a lie you’ve got to rise above”

Ok, he was singing about someone who’d accomplished enough to give him the confidence to stand on a table at his ten-year reunion, in front of a bunch of douche bags that probably shunned him along the way, and give them all a one giant “F U!”  I wasn’t there yet; the truth was the only thing I accomplished was that someone gave me a piece of paper with my name on it.  But I was the first college graduate in my family.  The statement alone made me proud.  Perhaps too proud.  Saying it was enough for me; I could rest on the laurels of my “accomplishment” and be ok with it.  And I did.  I still had rebellion in my heart.  I didn’t exactly know what rebellion meant to me, but as the summer wore on it was on the tip of my tongue whenever someone at work asked me what was next.  I just knew I didn’t want to be part of “the real world.”

One hot summer night two of my roommates and I were at the bar and a girl who was in one of my English classes came over and sat with us.  She and I talked about graduation, about the burden of people asking us what we were going to do with our lives.  She was working as a waitress and had no real plans that would make anyone blush either.  It was a redeeming quality the way deep eyes, great conversation, or a nice rack is at other junctures in time.  She came home with us that night and after my roommates went to bed this girl and I stayed up most of the night.  We listened to Room For Squares on repeat and though she thought John Mayer was “a pussy” she could understand where he was coming from and it sounded like a comfortable enough place to visit.  We kissed just enough for both of us to want more, but stopped just short of regretting it.  The alcohol was talking and for once, for both of us, we decided not to listen.  Or so we said.

The next night I took out for the back country roads and thought about the previous night.  This girl wasn’t everything I wanted.  Truth be told she wasn’t anything that I wanted.  But in the Paula Abdul “Opposites Attract” sort of way she was.  She was a warm body, a good enough kisser, and she was at the same crossroads of life as I was.  She didn’t have a plan—didn’t want one—and that fact alone was enough to make me want her.  I went back to the bars for three nights after in hopes that she’d walk in, we’d have a few drinks, and pick up where we left off.  But she never came in.  After the third night I started to take it personal.

The third song on Room For Squares is “My Stupid Mouth” and in the ensuing days that became weeks I adopted it as my anthem.  I thought our night together had ended well enough—I couldn’t remember anything that might have set her off the tracks—but the fact that I couldn’t find her made me reassess everything I couldn’t remember saying that night.  Did I say too much?  Did I say too little?  Should I have reacted with more persistence?

“I’m never speaking up again

it only hurts me

I’d rather be a mystery than she desert me

oh, I’m never speaking up again

starting now “

My confidence took a nose-dive.  The Summer of Justin started to feel lonely and cold; the late-night talks and devouring of chicken wings suddenly didn’t hold the same promise or weight that they had at the beginning of the summer.  I stopped taking pride in the fact that I thought of myself as Mr. Not Have A Plan and started seeing myself as College Graduate: CD Stock Boy.  I wasn’t even appealing enough to keep someone I wasn’t appealed to around.  So I turned more to the music.

There’s a Catch-22 when it comes to putting your faith in the words of people who have succeeded when what they’re selling is failure, hope, heartache, and second-chances.  Once upon a time the only redemption Bruce Springsteen might have been able to offer a girl was beneath his dirty hood, but he’s been an uber-rich rock star for so long now that it’s hard to hear “Thunder Road” without thinking about the valet who is going to park his car when he gets where he’s going.  That’s a reason, I think, why true art will always be a young person’s calling.  That’s not to say that lasting art is impossible to create when you get beyond a certain age because it doesn’t; Bob Dylan’s work in the past decade and Johnny Cash’s American Recording series is all the proof anyone would need that art doesn’t die once you secure Social Security.  But there’s an honesty, an earnestness, a desperation when you’re young; what you have to say always feels like it’s the most important thing that anyone will ever say.  When you lose the platform to say it you want to fight for all you’re worth to get it back.  You might be jaded by people but you’re not yet jaded by the world.  Masterpieces are created.  Love is found.  Crazy nights are had.

One night towards the end of the summer, a few days after I’d moved into a new place with two of my closest friends, I went to the bar with the intention of drinking myself into the sort of inspire-minded stupor where I could leave my inhibitions on the bar stool when I was good and drunk and go home and start my masterpiece.  As I was getting ready to leave I felt a warmth ease into the barstool beside me.  It was the girl, in all of her “I’m sorry for avoiding you” glory.  I was just angry enough to avoid mentioning it all together.  When she suggested that we go back to her place I couldn’t think of a better thing to invest a “Sure” in.  When we started kissing her lips felt better than I’d remembered and I kissed her as if I’d never get another chance.  Her room was hot when we arrived, but as the session went on it started to feel like an interrogation room.  It was hard to breathe.  After a while, it got hard to concentrate.  Her body felt like sitting right next to a fire.  I leaned back to catch my breath, resting my head against the small fan she had beside her bed.  The next thing I remember the room was dark, except for a bright light across the room.  It took me a minute to gather my bearings, to figure out where I was.  When the situation came into focus I looked towards the light, which I realized was her computer screen, and I saw the girl sitting naked in her chair, a shiny object in her hand.  At first it looked like a stone; some obsidian rock you’d find washed up on some beach in the midnight moon.  But I couldn’t figure out why she’d be holding a rock in the middle of the night in her bedroom in some college town in Pennsylvania.  Just before the shiver of light met her skin I realized what it was: a knife.  Either out of fear or shock I watched as she made several small slices to her legs.  I watched her face in part to see how she’d react to the steel piercing her skin, but also to see if she was going to look on me.  The one time I started to see her turn her head in my direction I closed my eyes and pretended that I was asleep.  I opened one of my eyes just enough to see if she was creeping towards me, with knife in hand, ready to strike.  She cut herself a couple more times, wiped the blade clean with a Kleenex, set the knife in a sheath and tucked it into her bookcase.  She made her way over to the bed and laid beside me.  My eyes still closed, I felt her wrap her arm around me and let out a sigh as if she’d just walked through the door after a hard day at work.  Her breath was warm, almost comforting if I hadn’t just seen her cut herself multiple times with a knife as she sat in her computer chair.  In an instant I found myself believing in God, whispering in the dark that if I made it through the night with my head, manhood, and life intact, that I would change my ways for good.

I don’t remember falling back asleep but I remember waking up.    She was staring at me, her blue eyes looking deep into me.  “Good morning,” she said with the sort of quite confidence you have with someone you take pride in waking up next to.  “Morning,” I said, trying on my face to not show the “Holy Fu@k!” feeling I had inside.  When she leaned in to kiss me I was like a dear in headlights about to get smashed by the oncoming car.  It felt like I was kissing a girl who, just hours prior, cut herself five feet from me.  “So what do you want to do this morning?  Do you want to get breakfast or something?” she asked.  I heard myself say “No!” a decibel level below screaming it before I could stop myself.  “I’ve got…ah…ah…stuff to do.”  She asked if she could drive me, and she was wearing desperation better than she was wearing her own naked skin.  I didn’t want to look for cut-marks but all I wanted to do was look for cut-marks.  “No thank you” I said, and I could see the disappointment on her face.  I could see it in her eyes, all she wanted was the right answer.  And I was pretty sure she could see what I was thinking in my eyes; the “Get me the hell out of here you crazy bi!ch!” I was trying to fight.

When she dropped me off I sprinted up the driveway, through the front door, and went straight into my room locking both doors behind me.  Sitting on my bed, I looked around the room.  The silence was overwhelming, all I could see, all I could hear was the striking of her knife.  So I turned on my CD player.  The solace that I’d found in “Why Georgia” for that entire summer was gone.  That is not what he meant by a “quarter-life crisis.”  It couldn’t have been.  But that’s exactly what it felt like.