So this was my new life: a thousand miles north of my school, moving in slow motion, cutting open boxes of Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks. I shared news and stories of Miami with the mulleted stockroom guy, as we placed boxes of fish sticks on a pallet. He agreed with me about the backward messages. “Sounds like horseshit to me,” he said. Later, after work, he sent me home with a bag of weed—“Carolina Kick-Ass,” he called it—with a lighter and some papers. He couldn’t believe that I’d never tried pot. He also included a cassette of Yngwie Malmsteen, a famous Swedish heavy-metal guitarist who played a thousand notes a second.
* * *
—
Each night I’d come home, put a Stouffer’s in the microwave, and retreat to my room. My poor parents. They thought they’d sent me off for good only four months ago. That had been their first taste of peace and quiet in seventeen years. But now, once again, there was one more shower to wait on before work, one more car in the driveway to move, and once again loud music blasting from my old bedroom.
“Maybe turn that down a little?” Papa politely suggested one afternoon through my bedroom door, after a couple of knocks. He asked about my plans for college.
“Well, if I’m going to go back to Miami, I’m going to need a scholarship,” I said. “So I’m looking through some ROTC brochures and I’m thinking about the Army—”
“You’re fucking high,” he said. And disappeared.
Coincidentally, just prior to that moment, I had lit my first amateur-hour doob all by my lonesome, timing it with an overzealous inhale. The whole loosely rolled joint, a couple of inches of badly twisted paper, had gone up in smoke before any of it could reach my lips, all in less than a second. I’m told if you roll them tightly this doesn’t happen. #ProTips.
Papa, of course, wasn’t talking about drugs at all. He was just questioning whether I was cut out for scrubbing the barracks toilets with a toothbrush and following orders. I wasn’t Army material, no matter what the recruitment officer had promised me about being in the field band. From the song “Army” (The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Ben Folds Five), written a good decade later:
Well I thought about the Army
Dad said “son, you’re fucking high”
And I thought, yeah there’s a first for everything
So I took my old man’s advice
By February, the correspondence with my former Miami classmates slowed to a trickle. It all seemed more like last year’s summer camp now. My tan was all but faded. My stitches were out, and I’d put away the jazz-fusion albums and the Ted Reed Syncopation book that all U of M percussionists practiced religiously. I traded in my thin-rimmed tiny John Lennon glasses for some thick black ones. I was cleaning up spills on aisle 17 and bagging groceries like a boss. I was doing what I was qualified to do—work at minimum wage. And that’s not hard luck. That’s just life. Still, it’s one thing to work shit jobs in high school, when there’s a theoretical life ahead. It’s another to realize the shitty job is your life.
Then there was the matter of the math:
$3.35 x 40 hours per week x the Rest of My Fucking Life = Not Enough Dough for University of Miami.
So this is how it happens! I thought. This is how you become the manager guy who looks like Lyndon Johnson. You start out as a bag boy and you just keep doing it until your nuts drop and your parents die and leave their house to you. Frozen in time thirty years on, wearing the same white button-down shirt, tie, and glasses, style and technology changing around you.
I shuddered.
Okay, maybe I managed to inhale a tiny bit of pot with all that paper.
* * *
—
After work, I found solace listening to records alone in my room, obsessively, for hours on end, like I had when I was two. I broke out my old punk and new-wave records, as well as new bands like the Replacements, who seemed to struggle to stay in time with three chords but understood life (so I thought), stories, pain, and irony. The Smiths too. In fact, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” came out a year too late, or that song would have certainly been my best friend as I fantasized how I would quit the grocery store. But this was a rather friendless era, and this music was my only company. I didn’t care if it turned me to Satan.
I’d found no such company, advice, or danger in the kind of records that students of academic jazz were trained to make—the music I’d tried so hard to love while at Miami. I had been understandably starry-eyed about my peers, who knew the cool scales, could play the jazz stylings of the masters, and had real gigs after classes. Even if I felt they were a little mean to me. But I now imagined those same cool kids aging into cocktail entertainers. I was beginning to suspect I’d dodged a bullet when I was sent down from jazz school. Had I been fucking high? Why had I chosen to study music I didn’t even like?
I was beginning to rebel against academia, but I can now appreciate that my short semester at Miami provided me with an invaluable harmonic vocabulary, all still very much a part of my musicianship. Half my heart has always been in primal rock and roll, but the other half will always beat in odd time signatures, warmed by gratuitously intricate melodies and fancy harmony—all of which was introduced to me in music school. My defection back to Team Rock and Roll was, in part, a defense mechanism that helped ease the disappointment of having been chewed up and spat out of school.
* * *
—
But, still, something bigger was brewing.
* * *
—
Maybe I could/should finish these piles of song fragments I’d been sitting on, so I might make a living making my own kind of music one day? The only problem was, I hadn’t come up with “my own kind of music” yet. Exhausted at the end of each day, I could barely get my shoes off, much less write a song. I remember telling Papa that I’d started nearly a hundred songs in my life but hadn’t been able to finish a single one, at least one with words.
“Well, Benjamin,” he said, “maybe it’s just that you’re not a songwriter.”
He was right. At that very moment, I was not a songwriter. I was a fragment-writer at best. I was a broke college dropout who lived with his parents and called himself a songwriter. I decided at that moment that I would do whatever it took to finish songs—good ones. I forged ahead in my room after work with a notebook, no matter how tired I was. I finished verses in my head as I stamped prices on cans and pushed pallet jacks, grinding my teeth to the groove of my ideas.
But the more lost I got in my songs, the more I fell asleep at the proverbial wheel at work. I was still a kid you wanted to keep away from the power tools. My chronic daydreaming and fucking up started to become more apparent to my co-workers. Near the end of my three-month tenure at Mt. Labor, I was cutting open cases of canned meat-stuff (that’s exactly what it was called) and was so spaced that I didn’t notice the teeming nest of white maggots that had covered my hands, making their way up my arms.