Okay.
* * *
THE JAM SESSIONS with the Foothill kids become more serious. We bring in guitar pedals and crank the amps. I speed up a few of the countless bad folk songs I’ve written to rock-and-roll tempo. Eric, the tall blond-haired drummer from the Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, keeps pace as I pound on my guitar and scream off-key into an old mike we’ve duct taped to a broken lamp. Nothing about it sounds good. But there are occasional moments when the loud guitar and the booming drum fuse together with a certain impromptu lyric and there is a brief feeling of transcendence, as if witnessing an apparition, a parting of the clouds to reveal a blinding beam of light and I feel like I’m floating weightless.
The moment passes and the guitar sounds thin, the drum is off tempo, and my low, raspy voice resembles a chain saw that has hit a knot and stalled.
Dad calls me once a week and we talk about classes and sports. I tell him about Saint Augustine, Maimonides, or cognitive dissonance and he tells me about the offensive schemes of the San Diego Chargers. It seems like a bargain we’ve made, to inhabit each other’s world like this, to have this closeness with another grown man. He doesn’t mind the purple hair and rock and roll. All he says about it is, “Things are starting to get interesting.”
A group of us find ourselves at the Fillmore in San Francisco one night to see the band Weezer. The place has the contradictory air of faded glory: the smell of stale beer and old tile juxtaposed with a huge crystal chandelier and a raised stage suited for tragedy.
The opening act shuffles onto the stage. The lead singer is a tall, skinny, balding young man in thick glasses who proceeds to plug in his guitar, look to his bandmates and start a riff. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. He growls into the mike while his guitar player screeches something off-key and atonal, a mix of sweet melody and frustration. The lanky singer screams, “You’ve got it all wrong! You can’t get it right!” and I can’t help but bob my head.
I ask Eric their name and he tells me they are called Archers of Loaf.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
He shrugs.
By the fifth or sixth song the singer is growling, “The people gathered all around the radio to hear the transmission from the devil’s soul, locked and stunned and sick and cold, toasting their dead hero.” The drums are pounding, as loud and overwhelming as any hard rock show, but nothing about it carries the whiff of preening falsehood. It’s all frustration and anger, a chaos among the blur of bad haircuts.
I think, Why is this not the biggest band in the world?
I don’t care that it’s devolved into discord and noise. I want the chaos. I want the noise. I feel relieved to be at the show, to be anonymous in the heat of bodies. There’s no way this band knows about the cacophony of shame and anger swirling around my head, but it’s as if they’re playing the soundtrack to it. To be precisely broken. To just embrace it. To lose yourself in the crowd, find yourself in the dark.
We begin to go to shows as often as possible. To see Radiohead or Pavement, local punk bands or touring folksingers, artists who perform their pain onstage, who turn it into something beautiful or angry or cathartic or strange. I’m reminded of the long days listening to the Cure, the Secret Place where it was just Robert Smith and me, pounding fists into the bed at eleven years old wishing I was someone else, somewhere else. Did I realize I was wishing I was here? Right here with the energy from the crowd, the clapping, the feeling of buzz in my teeth like there might just be a riot tonight after all? Because I want it. I want the fucking riot. I want us to throw the chairs in the middle of the floor and light them on fire, to dance around them while we scream. And to know it might happen—that we might end up in the parking lot, torches in hand as we turn over a car, shirts off, fists raised, a primal bellow echoing up from our chests—that’s the whole reason we’re here.
Maybe it’s the beer. Maybe it’s a desire to not go home, to not really know what that is. Maybe like my parents, like all the people who joined the cult, it’s a desire to just reject it all, the whole damn society, and start over. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m drunk, for the first time in my life, truly drunk and not caring about it, not thinking endlessly about the “addiction that runs in families” and just pounding vodka instead. Maybe I’m tired, from all the meetings, books and pamphlets, of being excluded from the basic desire to Just Not Give a Fuck. I’m a little scared because I know “alcoholism is a family disease” and I am thus playing with fire, but I guess that’s the point: the fire. I want to do whatever it takes to burn it all down. Maybe I’m lonely because there is no place for me at school, among all that crushing optimism. But there’s a place for me here in the darkness, here with the crowd where I can scream and wail and feel precisely weird. A place where you can take a kind of pride in pain. You wear it like a badge of honor the way a soldier wears medals on a uniform, symbols of battles fought long ago. Yes, that’s right, I’m not from the fucking suburbs. No, my dad was not a fucking lawyer. No, we were not tucked in and read a story at bedtime. We had nightmares and demons and it taught us to run. These are scars. All of them. Scars. And they are not going away. No, I don’t feel okay about it.
Take your pain and make it useful. That’s what it means to be an artist. I never want to go home anyway.
* * *
BY THE TIME graduation arrives, we’ve been to at least a hundred shows. I know the rules by heart, the disinterested attitude, the ratty thrift-store clothes, a certain bob of the head that becomes a sway, the mosh, a frenzied jump around the circle pit, if there is one. It becomes second nature. Eric and the other kids from Foothill College are all planning to play music with their lives. I don’t know what I’m planning to do with mine yet. It feels like my scholarship was a gift and with it came an obligation to give back, like a debt is owed to my community for the gift of an education. It occurs to me that teaching at a lower-income school might be a way to begin to repay this debt, so that’s my plan for the fall.
I decide to invite Mom to graduation. We have not spoken since the letter. There’s a kind of quiet acknowledgment when she arrives, a formality we fake for appearances after not speaking for so long, as if the previous three years were simply a hiccup. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. She arrives, along with Dad and Bonnie and Grandma and Grandpa Posner, Tony and his son. Everyone tells me how proud they are. Dad most of all. He’s gone from being suspicious of higher education to being one of those parents who walks around in a Stanford sweatshirt chatting up anyone who will listen about the rigors of his son’s academic life. I don’t mind. It feels like a concession, like we’ve acknowledged our differences and decided to tell each other about our individual worlds. He’s still my favorite person to watch a Laker game with.
In the morning, a few of the guys from the track team I stayed friends with and I decide to wear track spikes and T-shirts that say “Stanford Track” beneath our robes, which we plan to unzip as we run ahead of the crowd of incoming graduates at Stanford Stadium before the commencement address. We smile as we do this, our hands raised in triumph, sprinting in front of the procession.