It’s my last Saturday in Atlanta, so of course I woke up feeling like I should do something momentous. This of course, paralyzed me from figuring out what I wanted to do. So Marshall and I made blueberry pancakes kind of like any other Saturday, and now he’s installing his old cd player in my car because he got a new fancy i-pod-ready one. That and he’s that kind of great. He was looking forward to doing this today, so hooray for him. I was looking forward to just being inside, mostly; it’s so blazing hot.
You Are a Grown-Up Now. Go.
We were listening to Monster, that REM album, and were talking about what it reminded us of. Marshall said it made him think of moving into his first real apartment away from home here in Atlanta and thinking, “My god. I’m a real grown-up.”
Me: I’m just seventeen or so and hanging out with David, one of my two best high-school friends. We’re going to see REM at Starlake Amphitheatre in Pittsburgh. Now, this was a huge deal because David’s parents let him use their minivan and see, they were the sort of parents who didn’t trust their son to do anything; one time when eight of us ordered the “Tons of Fun for Everyone” 32-scoop ice cream dish at Kings, David ate the most in conventional growing-boy style and then got sick in the car later and his parents grounded him when he got home because they would Not believe that he hadn’t been drinking even though we were the types of kids who got off on making chocolate layer cakes and dancing around to “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants late into the night more than anything else. They didn’t see this in him and this infuriated me.
Anyway. So, this was a big deal, right? The summer before, I’d gotten my driver’s license and had scraped the side of my dad’s car driving the two of us to go see Jeff Buckley and Juliana Hatfield (I know) downtown, and so the notion of Driving the Family Car to a show outside of Pittsburgh’s South Hills' suburbs had been gathering something of a fearful stigma with the two of us.
We get to the amphitheatre and did I mention it was raining and had been all afternoon? David and I get a spot on the already-muddy lawn there in the drizzle and then Luscious Jackson comes out to open and they play that “Naked Eye” song which we both get excited about and then it’s pouring and we’re dancing in the rain and feeling like we’re teenagers and living life fer realzers, you know? And then REM comes on and it’s still raining and Michael Stipe makes some joke about, “Is everybody wet out there?” and David and I both swoon some. It’s then that the frat boys come.
Now, I know that “frat boys” has become just sort of a catch-all term for beer-guzzling beefy young men with no sense of the subtle or artistic. It’s not very interesting for those of us who would like to imagine that people – all people – are more complex than that. However, these were literal frat boys, about ten or, in the most sparkling version of my recollection, at least three-dozen or so. Maybe the very such brothers who had the term coined. This band of young men arrived in a pack and parked themselves and their coolers of beer, already very depleted, right behind these two nerdy artistic kids (us), there on the lawn. They then proceeded to seize the moments between songs to engage in lusty chants such as, “We are! Penn State! We ARE! Penn STATE!” All in all, an exercise in camaraderie and true, platonic-ish love among young men - love that challenged the very descriptor “fraternal.” By the middle of the show, about eight of them had linked arms, shoulder to shoulder, chorus-line-style, and in this way, they swayed during “I Don’t Sleep I Dream,” crooning along with the chorus: “I’d settle for a cup of coffee, but YOU! KNOW! WHAT! I really neeed!” The same with “Strange Currencies,” the unrequited heartsong of the album.
Makes one think, really, about the limits of brotherly love.
And again, I stress: right behind us, this was. Spitting distance. No, closer: Pissing distance, really. I know this because several songs later, I felt a drizzle on the back of my ankle distinctly warmer than the water that had been pouring from the sky for hours – and I turned around to see about six of the young men, still in Rockette formation, performing their epic number: pissing as one. I don’t remember what song was playing, only that after shouting, “What the fuck?!” to them, -well, sort of to them; it was mighty loud you see and I might’ve said it while turning my head back to David and then hissing, “We need to move up. They’re peeing. They’re peeing!” This love of confrontation that comes through in all I do really has been a lifelong passion.
Later that night David and I walked/trudged back through the fields to the minivan to find out that we'd left the headlights on. No battery. Which, in an over-sheltered teenager who's already up against his curfew, translated to: complete panic. We found someone with cables who helped us out though, and drove on home.
The degree to which that evening seemed like such an epic adventure makes me think of all the ways we were protected to a fault back then: A group of us dorky-types were really excited to be running the school's literary magazine. For about four months. Then at a fundraising rock/art show, some kid threw a snowball which broke a window at the rec center. After that, our leadership was taken away. There were rumors of drug use, we were told by the principals who called us in for our individual talks. Things were just getting too riotous and raucous and other words ending in "-ous." My older sisters and friends and I share stories of arriving at college to find peers with years of leadership experience on us. Kids who already knew terms like "management style" and "fundraise" and how to implement them to become temporary mini-dictators of campus. We were just psyched that no one demanded a hall pass from us. Maybe that's part of why I was so drawn to rock shows as a teenager. Especially to snarling, loud, barely-in-control-sounding albums like Monster. Our adventures at Graffiti or one of the other downtown clubs were our first and only moments to experience the loudest version of the larger world thre was, and to prove ourselves against it. At least that's how it felt at the time.
You Are a Grown-Up Now. Go.
We were listening to Monster, that REM album, and were talking about what it reminded us of. Marshall said it made him think of moving into his first real apartment away from home here in Atlanta and thinking, “My god. I’m a real grown-up.”
Me: I’m just seventeen or so and hanging out with David, one of my two best high-school friends. We’re going to see REM at Starlake Amphitheatre in Pittsburgh. Now, this was a huge deal because David’s parents let him use their minivan and see, they were the sort of parents who didn’t trust their son to do anything; one time when eight of us ordered the “Tons of Fun for Everyone” 32-scoop ice cream dish at Kings, David ate the most in conventional growing-boy style and then got sick in the car later and his parents grounded him when he got home because they would Not believe that he hadn’t been drinking even though we were the types of kids who got off on making chocolate layer cakes and dancing around to “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants late into the night more than anything else. They didn’t see this in him and this infuriated me.
Anyway. So, this was a big deal, right? The summer before, I’d gotten my driver’s license and had scraped the side of my dad’s car driving the two of us to go see Jeff Buckley and Juliana Hatfield (I know) downtown, and so the notion of Driving the Family Car to a show outside of Pittsburgh’s South Hills' suburbs had been gathering something of a fearful stigma with the two of us.
We get to the amphitheatre and did I mention it was raining and had been all afternoon? David and I get a spot on the already-muddy lawn there in the drizzle and then Luscious Jackson comes out to open and they play that “Naked Eye” song which we both get excited about and then it’s pouring and we’re dancing in the rain and feeling like we’re teenagers and living life fer realzers, you know? And then REM comes on and it’s still raining and Michael Stipe makes some joke about, “Is everybody wet out there?” and David and I both swoon some. It’s then that the frat boys come.
Now, I know that “frat boys” has become just sort of a catch-all term for beer-guzzling beefy young men with no sense of the subtle or artistic. It’s not very interesting for those of us who would like to imagine that people – all people – are more complex than that. However, these were literal frat boys, about ten or, in the most sparkling version of my recollection, at least three-dozen or so. Maybe the very such brothers who had the term coined. This band of young men arrived in a pack and parked themselves and their coolers of beer, already very depleted, right behind these two nerdy artistic kids (us), there on the lawn. They then proceeded to seize the moments between songs to engage in lusty chants such as, “We are! Penn State! We ARE! Penn STATE!” All in all, an exercise in camaraderie and true, platonic-ish love among young men - love that challenged the very descriptor “fraternal.” By the middle of the show, about eight of them had linked arms, shoulder to shoulder, chorus-line-style, and in this way, they swayed during “I Don’t Sleep I Dream,” crooning along with the chorus: “I’d settle for a cup of coffee, but YOU! KNOW! WHAT! I really neeed!” The same with “Strange Currencies,” the unrequited heartsong of the album.
Makes one think, really, about the limits of brotherly love.
And again, I stress: right behind us, this was. Spitting distance. No, closer: Pissing distance, really. I know this because several songs later, I felt a drizzle on the back of my ankle distinctly warmer than the water that had been pouring from the sky for hours – and I turned around to see about six of the young men, still in Rockette formation, performing their epic number: pissing as one. I don’t remember what song was playing, only that after shouting, “What the fuck?!” to them, -well, sort of to them; it was mighty loud you see and I might’ve said it while turning my head back to David and then hissing, “We need to move up. They’re peeing. They’re peeing!” This love of confrontation that comes through in all I do really has been a lifelong passion.
Later that night David and I walked/trudged back through the fields to the minivan to find out that we'd left the headlights on. No battery. Which, in an over-sheltered teenager who's already up against his curfew, translated to: complete panic. We found someone with cables who helped us out though, and drove on home.
The degree to which that evening seemed like such an epic adventure makes me think of all the ways we were protected to a fault back then: A group of us dorky-types were really excited to be running the school's literary magazine. For about four months. Then at a fundraising rock/art show, some kid threw a snowball which broke a window at the rec center. After that, our leadership was taken away. There were rumors of drug use, we were told by the principals who called us in for our individual talks. Things were just getting too riotous and raucous and other words ending in "-ous." My older sisters and friends and I share stories of arriving at college to find peers with years of leadership experience on us. Kids who already knew terms like "management style" and "fundraise" and how to implement them to become temporary mini-dictators of campus. We were just psyched that no one demanded a hall pass from us. Maybe that's part of why I was so drawn to rock shows as a teenager. Especially to snarling, loud, barely-in-control-sounding albums like Monster. Our adventures at Graffiti or one of the other downtown clubs were our first and only moments to experience the loudest version of the larger world thre was, and to prove ourselves against it. At least that's how it felt at the time.
posted by Alice at 12:13 PM
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