Your Band Sucks (9 page)

***

THE MUSIC AND THE SMIDGENS OF ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING
began to go to my head. I kept my mouth shut in high school, convinced I'd be misunderstood. Now, full of late-adolescent spunk, electrified by guitars, I was damn well going to be heard. Finally confident enough, for the first time in my life, to be absolutely straightforward. Though the people around me might have preferred to call it “being an asshole.” “You lived your life,” Orestes told me much later, “like you played your instrument.” I still couldn't bully anyone physically, but I could bully
everyone
aesthetically. Oberlin, a colony of art nerds and mousy nose-to-the-textbook types, was a very safe place to do this. Despite its deserved reputation for excruciating political correctness, and even though the campus newspaper's letters page endlessly hashed out the minutest aspects of sexism and racism and taking back the night, few people there knew how to put up a real fight. Passive aggression was more common: a large percentage of Bitch Magnet flyers were routinely torn down. We gleefully replaced them, and then some.

Sometime during junior or senior year I was pulling together a few bands for another dorm or house party when, with some reluctance, I approached a musician I knew. He was really annoying, and I didn't care for his band, either. When I mentioned the party and asked if they could do it, he barked out a superior prep-school “Ha ha!”—and it really sounded exactly like “Ha ha!”—and added, “Everyone wants us to play that show!” Without hesitating, I banged out, “Well, I think you guys pretty much suck. But other people asked.”

He may have deserved that, but back then I sprayed that shit everywhere. I said stupid things. I
did
stupid things. On one of the first weekends of the school year, I slept with the woman at school who was involved with Orestes. I apologized to him, first on the phone and then in a self-lacerating letter, but a fissure opened that couldn't be easily closed. And I had other problems with Orestes, because he bought a dog.

I'm serious.

Specifically, a baby English mastiff he named Victor. I'm told they are delightful, but an English mastiff is a dog in the way that an aircraft carrier is a boat. Adult mastiffs can weigh more than 130 pounds, and they get big before they
realize
they're big. As a puppy Victor might see you lying on the floor and step on your face, unaware that this could break your jaw. When he leapt up to greet you, he would practically knock you down. You prayed he wouldn't cuff you in the nuts, because his paws were as big as baseballs. Each day the overflow from his panting mug could fill a few pint glasses. Luckily he didn't bark much, which was good, because when he barked, it scared the absolute crap out of you.

Orestes was too broke to kennel Victor—and god knows the band wasn't making any money—so oftentimes he brought him to shows, where Victor would wait, long-faced and lugubrious and panting and drooling, in the back of Orestes's truck while we played. Today, I understand the balm to loneliness Victor was for Orestes, but to me, back then, he only looked like an enormous pain in the ass. And Orestes was as bad as a new parent about him. One day he went on and on about how much he liked mastiffs and then he told me he wanted to get another one, and I lost it and started screaming. How the fuck would he be able to handle two mastiffs? He could barely manage one. You had to be a weight lifter—or Orestes—to take Victor for a walk. Once, when Orestes wanted to visit his girlfriend on the side, he tried, desperately, to talk me into boarding him at my parents' house for a few days. I turned him down. Possibly after a lot more yelling.

What causes most band conflicts? Disagreements and competitions over girls and boys. Money. People getting fucked up on drugs and booze, especially if different members prefer different substances. “Creative differences,” which means someone's ideas are so bad you start to hate him. Orestes and I fought most avidly
over a dog.
Sometimes one tiny thing your bandmate does drives you insane.

A mastiff is not a tiny thing.

***

EACH JANUARY, BETWEEN SEMESTERS, OBERLIN HAD A MONTH
long winter term during which students completed mandatory independent projects, however half-assed those projects might be. In 1989—my last January at Oberlin—my project was playing in a rock band, which made it the second January term for which I got school credit for Bitch Magnet−related activities. We had a mini-tour booked across the East and Midwest, and had studio time reserved in Chicago to record our second album with Albini. At the last minute the recording had to be canceled, because Orestes's beloved paternal grandmother, who helped raise him, died. (Albini gave the recording time to Slint, and those recordings came out in 1994 on a two-song self-titled EP.) We still planned to play all the shows, but—

But let me start somewhere else.

A windy Saturday evening in mid-January, around dinnertime at a gas station in the middle of Pennsylvania. The temperature's dropping. There's so little light by the pumps that you have to squint to jam the nozzle into the tank. Sooyoung and I are driving my grandfather's old car, a mid-seventies Oldsmobile, primer gray, shockingly huge by the standards of the eighties and possibly by those of the seventies as well. The front seat is one big bench, with nothing splitting the driver's and shotgun seats. You can seat three people up here, if necessary, and maybe four more in the back. That backseat and the enormous trunk—the kind that protrudes several feet past the rear wheels, a duck's bill sticking out its ass—are crammed with Sooyoung's and my equipment, plus some assorted student detritus, like my milk crate full of LPs. We just played two shows in New York and are heading back to Oberlin for one night before setting off for our next dates in Columbus, Ohio, and Champaign, Illinois. I just finished putting our ten or twelve dollars' worth in the tank while the wind picked up, promising another kind of weather—no, that weather is here, and the first raindrops start slashing sideways while Sooyoung maneuvers the beast back onto Route 80, heading west.

Somewhere between Milton and Williamsport, on a lengthy elevated stretch that connects bits of land as you cross the west branch of the Susquehanna River, the car's enormous ass starts sliding. Sooyoung struggles it back into place, but then it's whipping back and forth and momentum mercilessly takes over. The brakes lock, a big, slow spin begins, goodbye to the linear, that sickening and alarmed realization instantly familiar to all who've been through it:
We're gonna . . .

And we do. Head-on into the guardrail.

The good news is that it's not a simple thin steel guardrail but one plopped atop solid concrete, and we were going maybe twenty miles an hour when we crashed. The impact on our monstrosity, the front bumper of which seems a Chevette's length from the front seat, registers only as a sharp bump. We look at each other, wide-eyed, and quickly understand we're both okay.

But this is a narrow roadway with only a few feet of shoulder between the lane and the railing, and since the car now completely blocks much of the road, I push open my door to begin waving people around us—and put my sneaker down on a roadway so slick that I fall before I can even stand. Though of course:
Bridge freezes before highway surface.
What was light rain had become—what's the term?—a perfect “sheet of ice.” As I struggle back upright I see headlights a few hundred yards behind us swerve as cars start to-ing and fro-ing and scraping and crashing.

The next part is fuzzy, because it all happens very quickly, but we calculate that we can't stay in the car. We can't stand up on the road, either, or cower by the side of the road, because there
is
no side of the road. The cars skidding toward us can't stop or steer. So we vault over the guardrail and suspend ourselves from a handhold on the railing. I've wondered for years if our feet found a purchase on something—they must have, but I can't remember. Meanwhile cars serenely glide by, moving no faster than a brisk jog, wheels locked and motionless, plowing unstoppably into each other and into our Olds, each collision ending with popping and bursting sheet metal and the cymbal crash of breaking safety glass.

Then silence.

Tiny cubes of shattered glass are strewn all over the highway, refracting and distorting the streetlights. It's lit like a disco out here.

A few other cars are clustered around ours. A woman with puffy frosted eighties-mom hair, and who looks pregnant, heaves herself out of a passenger seat, looks me in the eye, and then looks away, cradling her stomach and repeating, “Oh, my baby,” in a central Pennsylvania drawl. She's fine, just frightened, and apparently a little drunk.

The Oldsmobile has a car-sized impression caved into its passenger side, right where I'd been sitting. The back window is shattered and lets in freezing rain. One guitar neck protrudes through the side of its cheap case. I touch it, then strum it. Miraculously it's still in tune.

Sooyoung snaps a picture of me on the highway, standing amid the lights and shattered glass.

I'm together enough to ask whether everyone in our wreck is all right, though if they're not, I wouldn't know what to do. (Luckily, everyone is.) Cop cars and an ambulance arrive. I have never understood how they make their way through such scenes, and I don't remember how they did here. Elsewhere on this very long bridge, I hear someone say, a tractor-trailer jackknifed. The cops tell us to sit in the ambulance. I guess they want us off the road. One guy inside with us seems confused. He was in a different wreck. He keeps saying he doesn't know where his wife is. One cop tells him she's at the hospital and they'll talk to him there, then looks away, and in the silence that follows a terrible feeling blooms.

Sooyoung snaps another picture of me inside the ambulance while I'm making a strange face. Local volunteers in their twenties, wearing thick sweatshirts, sit among us, chatty with each other and with the emergency workers. I'd say they're friendly, but they don't talk to us or anyone else from the wreck. Aren't they supposed to be handing out hot chocolate or something? They seem very casual about what has just happened. But it's comforting. I'm grateful that these multiple crashes aren't being acknowledged. The guy whose wife is at the hospital is quiet now, and I'm grateful for that, too.

Sooyoung and I don't go to the hospital, because we're fine. The Oldsmobile gets towed to a junkyard, and somehow all our gear and baggage end up with us in a motel room. I call my parents and tell my mom that there was a crash and the car is destroyed but we're unharmed. She does not take this news especially well. I find out later that people died in some of the other wrecks. I never learned what happened to the other man's wife.

The next morning we dig through the local Yellow Pages, find the closest cheap rental car, load it up, and drive, under a diamond-bright winter sun, to Stache's in Columbus, where we play with Hypnolovewheel and cancel the show in Champaign, and afterward drive the hundred miles back to Oberlin. To get into my tragic converted-attic apartment, you have to walk up a creaky back staircase. That night, when I arrive after three a.m., I find my housemate, Susannah, wild-eyed, waiting in her bathrobe.

“I heard you guys were in a really bad car crash and you were in the hospital.”

She's half-right, at least. I throw my head back and give her my best maniac cackle, saying it would take more than that to stop me. She's looking at me like I just came back from the dead. Everyone should see that on a friend's face at least once.

The rest of January was small-bore and soap-opera-y. I stayed up late, slept in, saw little daylight. We bored college kids, left alone in a frigid and snowy rural isolation, drank as much as you'd expect. There were irritations and small fights and intense bonding with others also stuck at school. Orestes and I and some other friends spent one night giggling and tripping on mushrooms, without Sooyoung. I think we wrote one new song. Whenever Orestes made spaghetti sauce for dinner, he added at least a half stick of butter, and for a while I thought this was the best way to make it, too.

When Sooyoung showed me the photos he took that night, they didn't look as amazing and otherworldly as I hoped. But I still wish I had them today. Because the crash was the highlight of that winter. Before we knew what really happened, nothing else was nearly as strange and as interesting—as magical—as vehicles turned into bumper cars, and the pure percussive crunch of each slow-motion collision on a highway suddenly as slick as an ice rink. Not a girl taking off her shirt in your room. Not another night at one of Oberlin's two bars. Certainly not the campus buildings looming over the flat, frozen landscape under gray and indifferent Midwestern skies. Bands died in wrecks. College students died in wrecks. Our classmates died in wrecks. People died in our wreck. But nothing happened to us. This is a fucked-up thing to admit, I know, about something really awful, but those still moments on the bridge, amid the safety glass glittering in the streetlights, are among the most beautiful I've known.

***

SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN, AND THE BY-NOW-FAMILIAR
counter-rhythm returned. I'd been pursuing a preposterously hot freshwoman, and suddenly she acted interested. Full lips, blue eyes, pale skin, a hint of a British accent, a tangle of long, loose, curly hair. She moved through campus with a dancer's upright posture, wearing an expression broadcasting that no one could tell her anything she hadn't already known forever, all of which I found incredibly inflaming. She didn't seem to realize she was way out of my league. Over the years I've gotten very little play as a direct consequence of being a musician—after a show, I mean—but I know I never would have approached her were it not for the band.

Shigaku was planning a European tour for us the following fall: six weeks, something like seven countries, around thirty-five shows. Sooyoung and I scanned itineraries outside the library's smoking lounge. Orestes's grandmother had left him a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it was agreed—I
thought
it was agreed—we'd all live there after Sooyoung and I graduated. When I blabbed about it to our American record label, that factoid showed up in a press release, which didn't thrill the other guys. As always, I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut about anything that excited me, whether in interviews or in private conversations. I didn't realize that my bandmates' silence did not equal consent. Nor that they were starting to feel that I was hogging the spotlight, inasmuch as there was any spotlight shining upon us.