I was trying to look like Bruce Springsteen on the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ album cover. He looks tough, and he’s sneering and he seemed like someone Jenny Parker might like. But it turns out she likes guys who wear Abercrombie clothes, like Rick, and he called me a faggot, and I didn’t really feel like Bruce Springsteen on the album cover, so I tossed the jacket back in the storage room and got a job to save up for some Abercrombie clothes.

I wash dishes on the weekends at Mazarra’s near the mall. Mr. Mazarra is a friend of my grandfather’s, and he pays me twenty dollars in cash at the end of every shift. The dish tank is like a hundred degrees, and it makes your skin wrinkled and spongy. There’s usually four of us back there – me, Ramon and Luis, who don’t speak much English, and Monte, who has Down syndrome and only works until seven. There’s another guy, Wayne, but we’re not allowed to work together because he went to prison for touching kids.

It can get kind of boring because there’s no one to talk to. Sometimes Ramon and Luis will teach me dirty words in Spanish, but most of the time I just sing songs in my head. There’s that one R.E.M. song, ‘Stand’ – I like to sing that but change the words to be about what I’m doing, so in my head I’ll go ‘Stand in the place where you work, now clean forks’, and stuff like that. It helps pass the time.

When I’m not in school or at work, I like to sit in the basement and listen to my dad’s records. There are loads of them in the storage room, packed away in wooden crates, all dog-eared and faded. At first I used to play them based on what the covers looked like – I listened to Pink Floyd for the first time because they had the man shaking hands with the other man who was on fire, and the Rolling Stones because they had the real zipper on the cover and Billy Joel because he always looks sad and lonely on all of his album covers, and I feel that way a lot.

I don’t ever remember meeting my dad. Mom says I did, but he left when I was little to live with some other lady in California. I’ve never been to California, but everyone’s always singing about it, so there’s got to be something to it. One day I want to go out there and find him and talk about records. Maybe he could help me sort some of this stuff out. Mom’s great and all, but she’s not really much help. She just sits on the couch after work watching T.V. and sometimes she cries, and if I tell her about any of my problems she tells me how great I am, which I don’t really believe, because no one else seems to think so.

I’m kind of like Simon. He sings a song about how he’s alone and he doesn’t need any friends, and he seems like he’s doing OK, so maybe it will work out. He has his poetry and books, and I’m kind of like that with my dad’s records. He’s also kind of short and puny looking and has a dumb haircut, so we have a lot in common. Except that Simon probably doesn’t get a million boners and zits and I bet his voice doesn’t crack all of the time. And he says he doesn’t have friends, but then what’s Garfunkel? If he ever got too lonely he could always just call up and say ‘Hey, it’s Simon, want to write a song?’ I don’t have anyone like Garfunkel.

Tonight is our school’s Spring Dance. I didn’t want to go, because I went to the winter one and the music was crap and I just stood by the punch bowl the whole time. No one wanted to dance with me, and after a while I just waited outside the gym until my mom came to pick me up. But she says she always had fun at school dances and made friends and that I should go. Plus, I got an Abercrombie shirt last week. It was $60, which adds up to three shifts in the dish tank. Mom said that was ridiculous, and that no one should pay that much for a shirt, but when I told her that the dance was coming up and everybody wore them, she paid for half of it. She told me to save the rest and maybe use some to buy a girl ice cream after the dance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that girls don’t like me, so I just said that I might. She’s always sad, and it would probably make her sadder to find out that I’m not as handsome as she thinks I am.

After I get out of the shower, I put on my Abercrombie shirt and try to style my hair all sorts of different ways. I make it like Sting’s, all pointy and messy, but I figure that Rick Huntington would make fun of that, so I try Rod Stewart hair, but that ends up looking just like Sting, and so I try to comb it down like the Beatles, but it’s not long enough, and even if it was Rick would probably make fun of that, too. He’s been on my case all year, ever since I wore the leather jacket. Whenever we pass in the hallways he does this thing where he jerks forward like he’s going to lunge at me, but he doesn’t, and when I flinch he laughs and knocks my books on the floor. Sometimes I really wish I was a tough fighter like Elton John or Mick Jagger, so I could just pop him square in the nose and tell him to leave me alone.

I end up doing my hair like I always do, and my mom says that I look really handsome. On the way there she asks me if there’s any girls I was thinking of dancing with, and I say maybe Jenny Parker, because the idea of me dancing with a girl seems to make her happy. She says that if Jenny and I wanted to get ice cream after the dance she could take us and even wait out in the car until we were done. I know she’s just trying to be a good mom, but it makes me want to cry because the idea seems so nice, and it will never happen in a million years.

Little circles of light bounce around the dark gym, and there are a few green and white streamers taped up in the doorway. A few girls are out in front of the DJ booth that’s set up under the basketball hoop, but they’re just kind of swaying, not really dancing. Everyone else is leaning against the walls or standing near the refreshments table.

I don’t really know what to do or who to talk to, so I duck into the bathroom for a minute, even though I don’t need to go. After that, I sort of take a lap and wind up at the DJ booth. The guy has big hoop earrings and when I ask him to play Fleetwood Mac he laughs a little. He says junior high kids don’t want to dance to Fleetwood Mac, but I tell him that I’m a junior high kid, and I dance to them all the time. He laughs again and says he’ll see what he can do. I head over to get some punch, where I run into Jenny. She has on a blueberry dress and heels with straps and her hair is swooped up. She looks really pretty.

‘How are you?’ she asks with the same chirpy sing-song voice she uses when she cheers at the football games.

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Glad not to be in science class,’ she says, emphasizing the word ‘science’ as if it were our little secret.

‘Yeah,’ I say, and then it gets quiet for a minute.

‘I really love Third Eye Blind,’ she says, pointing towards the ceiling.

‘They’re great,’ I say, though I don’t know who Third Eye Blind is. It gets quiet again, and I start to think about the idea of dancing and ice cream and how happy my mom would be. ‘Hey, um, I asked the DJ to play a song, and he said that he would if I got people to dance to it, so maybe you could help me get some people?’

‘Sure. What song?’

‘Yeah, what song?’ Rick says as he bumps his shoulder into mine from behind.

‘Rick,’ she says with gritted teeth, stamping her foot and narrowing her eyes.

‘What? I’m just playin’, he says with a smirk, putting his arm around her shoulder. I start to walk away but Jenny follows me and grabs my wrist.

‘We’ll dance to your song, OK? Just tell me when it comes on and we’ll get people out there.’

It takes about four or five more songs, but when I hear the first few piano bars, I signal to her, and she grabs two of her friends’ hands and a bunch of others follow. At first when the song kicks up, everyone is jumping around and hollering, but when it starts to settle in people just kind of sway a little and don’t seem so excited anymore.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Rick asks with a crinkled face.

‘Fleetwood Mac.’

‘Who?’

‘Fleetwood Mac,” I say again, this time looking at the floor, a film of heat covering my face.

‘More like Fagwood Mac,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You can’t dance to this shit.’

He walks off and most everyone follows him. Jenny stands around for a second, and it looks like she might say something, but her friend pulls her away. After a minute or so the DJ changes to a different song and looks at me with a shrug. I get another cup of punch, and Mr. Michaels, my English teacher, says that he likes Fleetwood Mac, so we talk for a minute. He tells me I should listen to them before they had Stevie Nicks. I tell him I will, though I don’t know which one Stevie Nicks is. I hope he’s not the singer, as I like him, and the girl, Lindsey. They sound nice together.

The next song is a slow dance one – Janet Jackson, I think – and when it starts the bouncing lights settle into a steady carousel around the room. Everyone partners up except for a few of us, but I’m the only one who doesn’t have friends around they can pretend to talk to. Jenny dances with Rick, and puts her head on his shoulder while I stand against the wall, wishing that I hadn’t spent so much on a stupid shirt.

I wait until the dance is over before leaving, wanting my mom to think that I had a good time. As I’m walking past the line of idling cars Jenny calls out to me from behind, wobbling in her heels as she tries to catch up to me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she says with a frown. ‘Rick is a jerk, and that was mean. I should’ve danced with you.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I like that song,’ she says, swiping a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘They played it when the president got elected. He played saxophone.’

‘Yeah, he did.’

‘Seriously, though, I’m really sorry. I promise to make it up to you some time.’

‘Well, um, if you want, we could go get ice cream? My mom can take us. She’ll wait in the car. I can pay for it.’

‘Oh,’ she says, her eyes falling to the sidewalk. ‘I, um, we’re actually going to hang out in Rick’s friend’s basement. He lives down the street.’

‘Oh, yeah, no, that’s OK.’

‘Maybe another time?’ she asks, returning to her cheerleader voice but still frowning.

‘Yeah, sure. I’d like that.’ She kisses me on the cheek and my guts stretch and twist like boiling silly putty. She smells like green soap and perfume. I feel a little like Bruce Springsteen.

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Was that Jenny Parker?’ my mom asks when I get into the car. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile so wide, her cheeks bunching against her eyelids.

‘Yeah.’

‘Does she want to go for ice cream?’

‘She can’t. Her mom says she has to go home. But we might go, another time.’ She puts a hand on my knee, shaking it a little. ‘Can we please just go home?’

I’m not daft enough to think that the kiss meant anything. I know she’s into guys like Rick who play football, and she just felt bad for me. But it made me feel nice, and maybe she could end up like a Garfunkel, and that would be a good start.

When we get back my mom turns on the T.V., curling up on the couch, and I head down to the basement and listen to songs about California.

My band, Anal Skull Fuckers, Inc., we say what we feel. We have a song called ‘Fuck George Bush’ and we come right out with it – we say that he sucks and he makes us mad. If Hemingway wrote a book called ‘Fuck George Bush’ it would probably be all about how the beer was cold or the sun was hot or how he had a headache. All of our songs are under two minutes, so we get straight to the point. And people really like us. Last summer we played a show in Pittsburgh and like a hundred kids showed up. The owner thought we were so good that he invited us back to play this summer, and we also booked a show in Buffalo and another in Cincinnati, so we lined them all up together and called it the Three Holes Tour (get it?).

Anyway, at the end of the year we had to write a paper on Hemingway, and so I told Mr. Hartley what’s what. I said that the book was stupid, and that Hemingway was a pussy who was too afraid to say anything, even when he blew his brains out. We had to cite other works, so I said that the book was as lame as his other one, The Old Man in the Sea, which we had to read the year before in Mrs. Donnelly’s class. I also said that Henry Rollins was much better than Ernest Hemingway, and we should read him instead, because he knew the world was shit, too, but he had the balls to say it.

I got an F, which meant that I failed the class and had to go to summer school, which meant I couldn’t go on the Three Holes Tour. If it were up to me I would’ve just quit school and gone on the tour, because the band was what I’m going to do for a living, anyway, but my mom said I had to stay in school until I was at least 18, which didn’t happen until August. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the band replaced me. They said it wasn’t fair to cancel the tour just because I was stuck in summer school, so they got this kid from the skate park, Stinkfinger Steve, to replace me. Me! The one who booked the shows in the first place! The one who wrote ‘Fuck George Bush’!

So I had to wake up early every morning and sit in a hot classroom that smelled like disinfectant while everyone else got drunk at the skate park and my band went on tour without me. All the English teachers must have had enough sense to go on vacation, because the class was taught by one of the gym teachers, Mr. Jensen. He favored the jocks, and was always showing off his college championship ring, even though he was only a punter. He called me ‘Johnny Rotten’ all the  time, but it wasn’t in a complimentary way.

‘How do you get through metal detectors at the airport, Rotten?’ he’d ask with a smirk and all of the jocks would laugh.

One night I got a call from Tom, and he said that someone from Morbid Records was at the Buffalo show, and offered to print a seven inch for us. But not for us. For them and Stinkfinger Steve.  He said that they’d been writing some songs while they were on the road, and were thinking of changing the band’s name to Satan’s Foreskin. I could hear a bunch of people in the background yelling and laughing. They sounded drunk. I just hung up the phone. If Ernest Hemingway’s band ditched him, he’d probably just sit in a cafe and talk about wine.

I went to the skate park. Roland was there, drinking tall cans of Steel Reserve under the ring of the spotlight. He was skinny and weird looking and only had seven fingers, ’cause his mom drank a bunch when she was pregnant. He had lots of squiggly homemade Nazi tattoos and could always score beer or pot or coke. I told him about the band, and about summer school, and he took me back to his mom’s place, which was above the bar that she worked at. It smelled like cat poop and garbage and everything was covered in cigarette ash. He gave me a tall can and pinched some coke from his mom’s room and said it would make me feel better.

It did, for awhile, but then I started to get panicky and my insides pulsed like a Joy Division bass line. I couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes, even though they were making me nauseous, and Roland wouldn’t stop talking about how much he hated Jews and blacks. The rabbit ears on his TV were wrapped in foil, and the horror movie we were watching came in fuzzy. I drank one more beer and went home.

The front door was locked, and my mom was out at the bar, so I had to crawl in through the kitchen window. I took my songwriting notebook and ripped it to shreds and threw away all of the tapes we’d recorded and hurled my bass out the window. Then I stole my mom’s wine and took all of the pills in the bathroom. Probably about seventy or eighty of them.

I woke up in the hospital. They made me drink black sludge and I threw up for a few hours, and once I was feeling better they moved me to another wing on a different floor, where the crazy people are. I’ve been here two weeks now. Doctors ask me questions all day, but I really don’t want to talk about the band, because if I talk about it, I think about it, and nothing hurts more than having to think about it here, where bug eyed crazies shuffle around and drool all over their green gowns. So I just shrug and say that the world is shit.

Fuck Ernest Hemingway.

I like her more on nights like last Monday. We sat in the corner booth at Mac’s, the half dozen other patrons lined up at the bar, necks craned, hypnotized by the game. Her hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail, no doubt tied shortly before leaving to meet me with the absent minded swiftness all women had, a simple act that always seemed to catch my eye, their fingers working like a guitarist during a solo. She wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, the sleeves bunched up at her elbows, and apologized in the event that she smelled (she hadn’t showered after the gym).

We filled glasses from a scuffed plastic pitcher of Natural Light and she played Billy Joel on the jukebox. The cracks that had begun to spread prematurely under her eyes weren’t caulked with makeup, and her lashes were like pencil lines, void of the goop that made them look like spider legs. She made self-deprecating jokes, but not the ones she makes on Fridays, the put-on kind that made her sound cool in a backhanded way, and somewhere during her third beer she started talking about exes, but not in the weary, jaded way she does on Fridays. Her stories and recollections informed a little on how the pigtailed third grader with braces had come to be in front of me, no less bewildered and afraid. On Fridays she acts as if she were born into the world as a 24-year old seen-it-all sexpot beyond the silliness of love, gin and tonic in hand.

When I went to the bathroom she had written me a note on my drink napkin, capping it off with a crude cartoon heart, an act that her Friday counterpart would react to with an eye roll and a fabricated gag, a finger pointed in her mouth.

“OK,” she had said towards the tail end of our second pitcher, clasping my wrist, trying for the second time to recompose herself from the type of laughter that induces voluntary face twitches. “You can’t tell anyone…so growing up, Melanie’s dad had this camcorder, one of those, like, heavy, clunky ones. And we used to decorate her basement with all of these gold streamers and strip lighting we’d found, and then we’d record ourselves lip syncing to ABBA songs.”

“That’s awesome!”

“No, it’s not,” she said, her voice muffled by the cotton sleeve she’d buried her face in. She sat there motionless for a moment before breaking back out into fits of laughter. When she raised her head she was sniffling and had to wipe her eyes with her sleeves. “We couldn’t sing, and we’d put on her mom’s makeup … we bought one of those, like, rhinestone applicator things and just covered a bunch of t-shirts. It was an unfinished basement … there was choreography … I need to go home and burn those tapes.” She laughed again, but this time more in control, putting a hand to her chin and shaking her head. It looked as if she was figuring something out about herself.

On our way back to her place, we locked arms, skipping and high kicking in near-unison down the street, oblivious to passersby as we belted out Scandinavian pop songs with all we could muster.

“WATERLOO! COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO! WATERLOO!”

Lying in bed that night, the beer-soaked breeze from her nostrils rustling my chest hair, I felt like I knew her, and we slipped our fingers together, and when I kissed her forehead it didn’t taste like makeup. On Fridays, I find myself licking my lips trying to get the chalky taste out of my mouth, and I’m not so sure.

On Fridays, amongst the crowd, she swats my hand away when I try to hold hers.

“This seems like a really dark chapter in our group’s story.” (Abed)

Near the midway point of a wonderfully disjointed second season, NBC’s Community offered up “Mixology Certification”, an episode that found the study group taking a dive bar field trip to celebrate Troy’s twenty-first birthday. Airing on the heels of absurdist meta parodies taking on zombies, conspiracy theories, and ‘bottle episodes’, “Mixology” returned the show’s feet to the ground of (sitcom) reality, bringing us face to face with its disoriented failures who attend community college. And in a season marked largely by over-the-top homages, references and gimmicks, it quietly delivers one the show’s most satisfying nods to date: Taxi.

I don’t know that creator Dan Harmon and his writing staff intended this – there is no direct or even subtle reference to the show within the episode – but the weary and wistful notes of “Angela (Theme From Taxi)” would find itself perfectly at home in a number of scenes. “Mixology”, like Taxi at its finest, is unflinchingly bleak and melancholy, the loose ends of its characters’ tribulations not so much confronted and tied up, but rather accepted with a quiet, lonely resignation. Towards the end of the episode, we see young Troy momentarily adopt the pragmatic cynicism of Judd Hirsch’s Alex Rieger – he’s stuck with these people and, in the end he’s not fighting it, because it’s not all that bad. But knowing that won’t stop the world from seeming so forlorn and confusing.

This is certainly not an angle limited to Taxi, but no other sitcom ever really captured the gritty desperation of those moments quite like it. Cheers, helmed by Taxi alumni, was quite capable of hitting these somber notes on occasion, but at the end of the day, it shied away from some of the more raw displays of flawed souls. Norm, for instance, was a drunk who never seemed to get drunk, and was never pressed to pay on his ever-mounting tab. The fact that he showed up before noon for a beer was never lingered upon with any sense of examination, only used as a premise for a Coach/Woody-Norm beer joke.

At its core, Taxi was not so much about the wacky adventures of mismatched misfits, but rather the idea that at the end of the day, the bitter boss, the dumb boxer (and actor), the divorced mother, the zany burnout and the ambitionless lifer were all essentially the same thing – terrified people who feel they’ve failed. Many shows since have attempted to portray this notion, along with the subsequent comfort that the characters all find in mutual company that can nullify or even reverse some of the misery, but very few ever travel beyond singular incidents or conventional tropes, and these days a great deal simply subcontract the emotional notes to a pop tune.

Community has been trying these pants on since its debut, though it often finds itself deluded amongst the other fifteen pairs it attempts to model. “Mixology”, however, proves as adroit as Taxi when it comes to stark portrayals of such an existence, while working within a medium that has seemed to wash away introspective depression and loneliness as the color brightened. Consider, for instance, that by episode’s end Shirley leaves still embarrassed by herself and unwilling to take the group’s loving cracks in stride, or that Pierce has only dug himself further into a cycle of Louie DePalma-like self-destruction and alienation, or that Jeff and Britta become realistically obnoxious when imbibing alcohol and make out, an event that barely registers as a blip in terms of the group’s dynamic (Elaine and Alex once spent the night together without lingering consequences on Taxi). These sorts of events are rare in today’s sitcom landscape, and no other attempts dare to dwell on them as candidly as “Mixology Certification” does, a sort of irony given that many critics wonder how Community can manage developing interest and depth in characters amidst such lunacy and surrealism.

Though not the funniest episode of the second season (that would be the postmodern clip show, “Paradigms of Human Memory”), “Mixology Certification” provides the bittersweet feeling that accompanies a visit to the world of Taxi – I sort of want to be with these people, in that study room or garage, even though I know it would be a very sad and aching place to find myself.

“When it’s not your turn.” – McNulty

 ”You cannot lose if you do not play.” – Marla Daniels

 ”The King stays the King.” – D’Angelo

 ”It’s a thin line ‘tween heaven and here.” – Bubbles

“… a little slow, a little late.” – Avon Barksdale

“… and all the pieces matter” – Freamon

“A man must have a code.” – Bunk

“This is me, yo, right here.” – Wallace

“All in the game.” – Traditional West Baltimore

“Ain’t never gonna be what it was.” – Little Big Roy

“They can chew you up but they gotta spit you back out.” – McNulty

“It don’t matter that some fool say he different…” – D’Angelo

 ”Don’t worry kid, y’er still on the clock.” – Horseface

 ”Don’t matter how many times you get burnt, you just keep doin’ the same.” – Bodie

 ”The gods will not save you.” – Burrell

 ”I had such fuckin’ hopes for us.” – McNulty

 ”Conscience do cost.” – Butchie

 ”Crawl, Walk, and then run.” – Clay Davis

 ”…while you’re waiting for moments that never come.” – Freamon

 ”Call it a crisis of leadership.” – Proposition Joe

 ”Aw Yeah. That Golden Rule.” – Bunk

 ”Might as well dump ‘em, get another.” – Proposition Joe

 ”You play in dirt, you get dirty.” –McNulty

 ”That all there is to it?” – Bubbles

 ”The Bigger the lie, the more they believe.” – Bunk

 “This ain’t Aruba, bitch.” – Bunk

Many will walk out with an uncredited minor in pharmacology. If your family physician hasn’t already slapped them with a prescription back in middle school at the first site of restlessness, they’re learning about Addies. First as a study aid, then as a party aid. After awhile, they’re learning to empty the RX capsules and crush the little wax pellets to get around the time release. Dextroamphetamine, amphetamine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, benzodiazepine – they’ll know the going street rates and how much you can drink on them before blacking out by the time they’re sophomores.

They learn quickly which bars serve unders, which sorority is the easiest, which fraternities have been slipping GHB into drinks, who’s got the best coke. They figure out a few tricks – washing the X’s off their hands, carrying a flask, memorizing the astrological signs on their fake I.D.’s, how to spot herpes, what to say to the doctors to get bumped up to fifteen milligrams, which gas station caffeine pill gets you through when the script runs out early. When funds begins to dwindle near the end of the semester, they’ll learn to fleece their books for alcohol money, like junkies at a scrapyard. And like junkies, they learn every which way to make it hit a little harder – beer bongs and gravity bongs and keys carved into beer cans. The odds are staggeringly high they will learn all too well about the interest rates not mentioned by the loan sharks offering pizza and t-shirts, or about what withdrawl feels like, or the pullout method as a form of birth control, or the habits of the crab louse, or which HPV types cause warts, or that no doesn’t always mean no.

Your daughters will be taught that they were asking for it – what with the short skirt and the drinking. Your sons will be reassured of the same, told that bitches do this sort of thing all the time, make up lies to cover up their indiscretions, offered up a steady stream of alibis to refute the girl’s story. They’ll all become more comfortable with its inevitability, slowly but surely, until it reaches various degrees of acceptance. There are rules here, after all — if she doesn’t have the capacity to slur a protestation loudly or forcefully enough, then it wasn’t rape rape.

Thursdays kick off the weekend in this town, but Friday still holds it’s traditional place as the steam whistle to signal freedom and abandon, where the real learning takes place. The bustle begins a little after dinner — trips to the liquor store, across the state line to pick up kegs and moonshine, to the apartments of grass dealers slinging Kermit green chronic for fifty an eighth (seventy-five to unwitting freshmen), to dorm pharmacies to get a slice of Adderall re-ups and dentist office Vicodin. They’ll return home to shower and get ready, everyone chatting about frat parties, house parties, their buddy’s bands playing, while they have a few drinks and put together song mixes for the pregame, where they will get themselves drunk and stoned enough to go out and get drunk and stoned.

By the time the carnival spills out into the streets and up the hill to the bars, most of them have drank away the better part of their common sense, what remains easily talked out of by slurring sycophants. Your credit card pays for their shots and five-liquor concoctions, served in plastic, as none of them appear to have learned how to handle glassware. They have learned how to play the game, live within the tribe, and they do it well. Your daughters know that your sons want vacant, seductive promiscuity, and they deliver, their Friday night banter more hollow than a porno, their bodies toned and tanned and on display. They need but sixty seconds of flirtation to get your sons to put it on your tab. Your sons see this willingness to appease, and the game is played, liquoring them up on your dime, every word not a line of communication, but an angle or a pitch, just waiting for a chance to strike. Sons use daughters, daughters use sons. Everyone has an ulterior motive out here, and everybody knows it.

Come closing time, the main drag of red brick is littered with trash and vomit and broken bottles as police lights flicker everywhere, tending to bloodied fight victims, freshmen passed out in the bushes, acts of mindless vandalism. Glassy-eyed drunks, separated from their pack, rendered incapable of rational thought by Jagermeister, lurch through the dark alleyways like vacant zombies, driven only by a search for food, alcohol, sex and sleeping arrangements. Girls sit slumped against trees in sundresses, holding their shoes, weeping aloud with no regard to the public as their carefully applied make-up streams down their face. Couples engage in white-hot screaming arguments that ring out across blocks. It’s as noisy and messy and drug-fueled as any forgotten ghetto. And you pay five figures a year to send them here.

“Don’t believe in what?” she asks, effortlessly shifting into second. Back when I used to find things sexy, the ability to drive stick was right up there with protruding ears or knee-high socks.

“Any of it. I don’t want to be a part of our society anymore. I’d rather go insane living outside of it than go insane living in it…look at them…they all look so miserable.”

“Maybe you’re just miserable. You sound like a teenager.”

“Good…that’s about when it started going downhill, anyway. I didn’t want to be a so-called ‘responsible member of society’ then and I sure as hell don’t want to now.”

“So what do you want?”

This empire to meet it’s fate and collapse on itself, weighed down by it’s decadence and false idols, like the Egyptians and Romans before us. To go backwards, so far back that we’re operating under a barter system and waiting weeks and months to hear back from drifting lovers, so far devolved and detached that our society actually fosters the discovery of the self, if that’s possible. To run off into the woods before their jaws get any more of my soul’s marrow. Everyone to strip naked in the streets and fuck indiscriminately like the dogs that we are. To fall in love every single day with someone new who will eventually fade into oblivion, a myth passed down from lie to lie, selected pieces of their fabled soul swirling with my own for the rest of whatever existence I envision next. Something enduring.

“A slice and a beer sounds good right about now.”

“This place hasn’t changed since high school,” she says, shaking cheese onto her sweating golden pizza. The slick tablecloths are checkered red-and-white. The same short-haired Italian woman wearing an apron looks on from behind the counter, smiling whenever our eyes meet. “So you never answered my question.”

“What’s that?”

“What do you want to do…in life?”

“I told you…living the dream as we speak.” I hoist up my limping slice and flash a smile.

“Be serious for just one second.”

“I don’t know…does it really matter?”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Seriously…what happens when your tits start to sag? What if the Fed went broke tomorrow and money became nothing but kindling and toilet paper? Who would you be and what would you want then?”

“That’s a cop out.”

“So is letting the world make a whore out of me,” I say, tipping back the last foamy remnants, twirling the empty and looking at her through it with one eye, her face warped and green through its lens.

I want to kick back my chair and run. Run from everything — her, the old Italian woman, the banks, the cops, the phone lines, the houses, the cars, the shopping plazas, the corporations, the mom-and pop shops, the debts, the credits, the network news, the clothes, the make-up, the perfume, the bad acting, the good acting, the notions of romance and lust, the cartoon hearts, the aspirations to be sitcom characters, the adjective ‘hot’, the office parks, the penthouses, the crack dens, the cannibalism, the greed, the envy, the hatred, the whole fucking charade. I’ll take my chances out in the wild, thank you very much. At least out there they flash their teeth and growl before they jump for the throat. Run, Dan, run.

Instead, I slide my only wrinkled dollar into the jukebox and play Katrina & The Waves, like I used to back in high school, and coax her into dancing about the empty place, gyrating and and leaping around as if we felt like Katrina sang, as if the Italian woman weren’t rolling her eyes, as if we were in love, as if nothing else mattered but right here, in this very moment. As if everything we knew about the world could end right now, and it would be alright.

As the manic song tails off, she draws herself so close that I can taste her breath, butting her forehead to mine.

“Don’t let them do this to you.”

This is not to say that if you consider yourself a Beatles person you don’t like the Stones at all, or vice-versa. It could mean a strong preference for one, not necessarily an aversion to the other. And it’s not necessarily an issue of musical preference – do you believe that murder is just a kiss away, or that love is all you need? Are the Stones realists where the Beatles are dreamers? Answering those questions won’t necessarily define your position, but it certainly sheds some light on your nature.

While I firmly believe that this distinction is a very valid one that can tell you a lot about a person, simply receiving an answer to the question will not tell you everything. For instance – any person under the age of twenty-five will immediately want to respond with Stones after hearing the above prompt. Doesn’t mean they will, but they will *want* to. Everyone would rather be a popular idiot than a lonely genius. Not to imply that this is a division aligned with the Beatles or Stones – Jagger isn’t necessarily an idiot (but who’s going to call him a genius?).

I think I’m a Beatles person trapped in a Stones person’s body. I would be much happier spending the night in with Whitman, but my legs inexplicably carry me out to the bar with Hemingway. I want to be both, all at once, and I’m halving myself trying to do so. Jennifer is definitely a Stones girl, or at least she’s done a good job of convincing us all. She’s wearing a sleeveless black vest over an MC5 t-shirt and she holds her cigarette as if it were a weapon, smoke exploding from her mouth like steam from a train whistle, signaling her jaded amusement at lesser beings. She knows that you want her, and that makes her infinitely less attractive.

‘I fucked Adam last night,’ she says, finding something fascinating in her crimson nails.

‘Why?’ Halfway through swigging my bottle I shake my head and throw up my hand with a grin that causes a little beer to seep from my lips. ‘Stupid question…I know exactly why.’

‘Clue me in.’

‘We’re just animals, right?.’

‘Exactly…it was just a fuck.’

‘Then why are we talking about it?’ She loses a little of her smirk and I gain a bit of mine. I’ve drawn the Beatle out of her. She loves him, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam is a recurring regret, the type that she will one day look at in distant photographs and feel sad, not just because he’s gone along with her youth, but because she really loved him and has come to realize that he wasn’t worth it. She senses that he isn’t worth it now, and makes wry remarks indicating so, but she rarely admits to herself or anyone else that at the moment it means everything to her.

‘He left his watch on my nightstand and I slipped it into the drawer when he wasn’t looking,’ she confesses, her palms patching her eyes.

‘You pulled a reverse Costanza?’ She just emotes what could be considered a groan or a laugh and shakes her head, eyes still shielded from this world.

“How about you?” she asks, flicking her bangs and recomposing her persona. “You still talking to that one girl you said was crazy?” The thought occurs that various friends have referred to current love interests as ‘the one you said was crazy’ for far, far too long. The pitfalls of chasing Stones girls, I suppose.

‘Pretty sure she hates me now.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because she’s crazy…and so am I, I guess.’

“Right,” she nods, glancing up at me with the smile they always give, the barely perceptible green light to go forward with the smarmy banter until we find ourselves asking for bus times in the harsh light of morning.

When we step out for a smoke, I will plant one on her, because that’s what a Stones man would do and that’s what a Stones girl wants. And it’s been my experience that when two Stones collide, the impact often causes them to shatter, or at least chip away a bit. She will look at me for a silent and momentous moment in a whole new light, a glowing Beatles smile in a Stones world, her eyes saying why and mine saying I don’t know. She will kiss me back, with the lost foolishness of a McCartney melody and the back gripping passion of a Jagger growl, and at that moment neither one us will have the slightest clue as to which camp we’re in.

I first became entranced with Mulcahy at the age of nine, by way of his band’s musical contributions to an early-nineties children’s television series called The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I don’t know what it was about the thirty seconds I saw and heard of him every week, rollicking around on the front lawn of the protagonist’s home with his frizzy unkempt hair, glamourless sweatshirt and jeans. But his frayed, emotional voice, the way he hopped onto the top of a bass drum and back off, singing carelessly into the mic, as if he and his buddies were just having a round of practice, somehow set off a spark.

The most daunting task one faces when writing about Mulcahy is figuring out how exactly to describe how truly beautiful an instrument his voice is. It’s entirely chameleon-like, a swirl of passion, longing, immediacy, mournful resolve, playfulness, instability, etc. He can go from a hardened growl to a frightened whisper in a matter of chords, and when he does it in front of you it’s arresting.

I spent entirely too much of my youth hunting him in various record stores around the country. Nearly every one in Northeastern Ohio has probably at one time or another put in an order for his works, and each and every one has come up empty. In the early days I foolishly hit the giant corporate chains, and it wasn’t until the second or third small time store employed by long haired clerks with tight fitting Ziggy Stardust shirts that I learned what “out of print” meant.

My fervent search occurred in the infancy of online purchasing and .mp3 files, so there were a few years of listening desperately to the occasional twenty second clip I managed to come across on some graduate student’s personal website. I was lucky enough to find an obscure 80′s compilation with a track from Miracle Legion, the New Haven outfit Mulcahy fronted for over a decade, a song I listened to so many times that I found myself playing it note-for-note in my head when I needed to kill the last few minutes of a boring study hall. This held me over until a small used record store an hour and a half away managed to snag a copy of a Miracle Legion album, a drive made with a begrudging grandfather ranting about ‘giving my money away to idiots’ (in his eyes, if you have long hair and/or are a musician, you are an ‘idiot’).

A misspent youth resulted in, among other things, my inability to obtain a driver’s license until the age of eighteen. The first chance I ever had to see Mulcahy was at a show in Northampton, MA. The drive would require a good twelve and a half hours, and fell on the weekend of our senior prom, for which I had inexplicably landed a date with a girl with frosted blue eyes who is still bitter and unforgiving about the whole thing to this day.

The trip was made alone — Mulcahy’s conversationally-toned lyrics are steeped in the confessional. He’s not telling you a story, not singing to you about an ex-lover, but rather he’s speaking directly to that lover, to himself, to the wall, but not to you; this is not something you were supposed to hear – a deluge of confused thoughts, naked desires and personal emotions, the innermost deliberation, barren of reserve, none of which has any place in the world of high school popularity. The lesson was learned quickly that Mulcahy was something to be kept to myself and no one else; after a friend’s demand to hear who I was forgoing practically guaranteed sex with Jill Huntington for, I was quickly dismissed as a ‘faggot’ amongst my contemporaries.

Northampton, nuzzled between the foothills of the Berkshires and the banks of the Connecticut River, home to Smith College, is a small village town made up predominantly of Colonial-era buildings housing art shops, record stores, music clubs and trendy restaurants. The downtown streets are red-bricked and narrow, and its drivers seem to have no sense of urgency, bowing calmly to passing pedestrians.

Dusk had settled in, and the town was buzzing with conversations, the cafes and streets filled with shaggy moptops and sportcoats over tight faded t-shirts, cherry hair, thick horn rimmed glasses and floral vintage dresses, a gay couple walking a ferret. I was strolling through town to kill time when I first saw him in the window of a small Mediterranean restaurant on Main Street. There was no double take or moment taken to register recognition. The second my eyes meet the illuminated window, I knew it was him, slurping noodles as he nodded to the pale girl with short, jet black hair across the table from him. The artist in his element.

He looked much more bloated compared to the pictures I’d seen of him. His square jaw had rounded out slightly, and one could see where jowls could eventually start to set in, right under his bushy sideburns that were about a week’s growth away from being described as mutton chops. His shoulder-length brown had hair had lost its edge, hanging limply from a line that had crept up his forehead considerably, unkempt but not in the vibrant way it used to. His nose was bulbous and bent, one you’d imagine on the face of an Irish dockworker.

His milky blue eyes seemed out of place amongst such working-class features. They burned with a sort of oblique longing; one look at them and you knew he was an artist. He wore an ill-fitting navy blue and green suit over a pointy collared shirt, unbuttoned enough to show a long silver chain amidst a tangle of thick chest hair. It’s a face you will never see on the cover of Rolling Stone.

The front room of the Baystate Hotel is nothing more than a garden-variety dive, lacking the flair the rest of the town possessed, a flair I had built myself up for, come to expect. In the daydreams I had while driving through the winding mountains of Massachusetts, the place was ornate, almost regal. The doorman accepted the scrambled proof of age on my license without incident as I tried to hide my disappointment of what was before me. My overzealous anticipation and a lack of anywhere else to explore had made me one of the first patrons of the evening, save a few that appeared to be regulars. The lights were kept depressingly low, the room illuminated by the glow from the outdated trivia machine at the end of the bar. The bartender silently crunched numbers on a calculator near an old brass register, noting my arrival with a quick stare. I pursed my lips and nodded.

He limply groaned that he’d be with me in a second, and before I had the time to become impatient, Mulcahy stalked up and seated himself next to me, taking a folded setlist-in-progress from the pocket of his coat and scribbling notes. My nerves fizzling, I ordered a Corona with a lime, for some reason thinking it was cool. Mark went for a pint of Guiness and I quickly began to second guess my selection.

I wanted to tell him everything, how late at night, alone in my bedroom, he’d always been there for me through all of the introspection, confusion, self-doubt and what I’d perceived to be lost love. I wanted to tell him about how my friend didn’t get him, and I did. I wanted to ask about love and women and indecipherable lyrics and vague liner notes, for an autograph or a photo. We talked instead about the Pistons.

“They look like the real thing this year” He took a pull from his drink, his eyes fixed on the small television screen hanging in the corner. “Good defense.”

“You got a horse in this game?”

“Nah. You?”

“Cavs fan.”

“Cleveland?” Whenever people say Cleveland, they either say it with patronizing reverence (‘Cleveland rocks!’) or chuckle with a laugh and a joke about river fires. “You from there?”

“Yeah.” My voice was quivering. I drove twelve and a half hours to see this man. Somehow, this man has become a kindred soul to me, a very influential part of my days; he’s soothed me, saddened me, lulled me to sleep. I had begun to realize the absurdity of this sitting in front of him, his mythic figure becoming human, but there was really nothing I could do about it. It’s who I am.

“Long drive?”

“Twelve and a half hours.”

“Jesus.” He laughed in awe to himself. “I’ve heard fourteen before…but that’s…that’s good, man.”

We talked about the game, and the deterioration of Cleveland, and the respect of staying with one team your entire career. He asked me if there was anything I’d like him to play, and I rattled off the first song that came to my mind. Once he slipped off to the back, I began a line questioning regarding whether or not I made the right choice, one that still continues to this day.

The back room of the place was spacious and well-lit, with round cafes tables scattered all along vintage maroon and gold carpet. Large chandeliers lit the room, their reflections shining against the mirrored walls, and thick, velvet maroon drapes cover the windows. It took about a half-hour or so after the crowd has swelled to its full potential before it hits me for the first time. Beatles haircuts. Pretension. Corduroy. Sideburns. Liberalism. Angst. Insecurity. Ironically ugly sweaters. Elvis Costello worship. Pale girlfriends with opinions. Fuck. This is who I was. These were my people.

I never wanted to admit it, never wanted to accept it. Because these people, my people, don’t date Jill Huntington. They’re too busy driving insanely long distances to see obscure singer-songwriters wax intelligently and wistfully on love and loss and doubt and sad happiness. And no eighteen year old girls, or at least any that I dated, wanted anything to do with that.

The stage was cramped and about half the size it probably needed to be, just enough room for Mark and his backing band. Before he played the request I’d nervously spit out, he called my name out into the mic and had me stand, announcing to the crowd the lengths I’d taken to get there. There was a mild smattering of applause and a few impressed head nods. Those sitting behind me patted me on the shoulder when I sat down. I’d gone from hiding it to being praised for it.

It wasn’t until late into college that I realized that perhaps my love of Mark wasn’t a dirty secret to be kept to myself.  The source of this realization came, as most tend to, from a girl, one as beautiful and blue-eyed as Jill Huntington, yet equipped with a fierce intellect and an appreciation for music beyond the Top 40. She, for some reason, appeared to accept me, all of me.

I didn’t have save him for solitude, there was no scramble to change the disc when she walked into the room. In fact, she seemed to take a genuine liking to him, text messaging me song lyrics and writing them into little collages she had made for me. It seems trivial, but in many ways it was an important gauge. If she liked Mulcahy, then she liked me. This vote of confidence led me to leave Mark on the stereo when guests dropped by; I began to loan him to friends. It turns out that there are a lot more of us than I thought, those who get Mark.

Mark Mulcahy will never be popular, and it isn’t for a lack of talent. It’s for his failure to adhere. His catalog shows a knowledge of the three minute pop song with the catchy chorus. He knows the rules. But he doesn’t play by them. He exposes himself for who he is, and doesn’t edit for the sake of a consensus. He’s himself, and he doesn’t necessarily fit into the right demographic, but that’s a big part of the attraction.

She has chin length chestnut hair, framing a Roman nose studded with a zirconia most likely garnered on a whim. Two tattoos mark her creamy skin, a tired tribal armband on her left bicep and what appears to be an eagle/falcon on the other. I’d bet money I don’t have that there’s another one somewhere else, probably the first ink she got done, well hidden from authority. Things begin to return to me – Cleveland, Jack, whiskey, his ‘tasty redhead thing’ and her roommate, the one who languidly runs a finger through a river of hair as she sits on the couch before me.

“Where’s Jack?”

“He had to run,” she says, eyes fixed on Regis Philbin’s manic yet folksy ramblings, her elbow resting on an angled knee. “I told him I could give you a lift.”

“Wonderful.”

“Coffee’s next to the fridge, cream and sugar in the skinny cabinet above it,” she says with a droning familiarity. “Also…Jack wanted me to tell you to ‘keep your tool cool’.”

“Sounds about right,” I mutter as she gets up and trudges over to the kitchen table.

“Do you remember my name?”

“No,” I say, taking the first sip that singes my upper lip. “Sorry.”

“Julie. You drink your coffee black…impressive.”

“What the hell is so impressive about it outside of superficial indicators?”

“I dunno,” she says. There is something morbidly appealing about taking these sorts of women down a peg, the faux-punk type that pretend to be bitchy and carefree and something every man aspires to be with. I want to shake the false confidence out of the world around me. No one is buying your act. They’re merely keeping quiet to be polite.

“So…did we…”

“Noooo,” she says, darting her eyes to the floor and leaving her lips puckering in the pronouncement of the elongated ‘o’. “You didn’t seem particularly up to it.”

“Like lack of an erection or apathy?”

“We never got to the erection part…so I’d say the latter.”

“Right,” I say, nodding my head. “So…would we have?” She erupts in cackling laughter.

“You wish.”

“No, I don’t, really…I mean not that you’re…just curious. I’ve been baffled lately as to why any self-respecting woman would take a drunken mess like me home…reinforces my beliefs on sex.”

“Which are?”

“We should either fuck everyone we see or fuck next to no one.”

“Nice belief system.” She curls her knees under her chin and rest her head on them. “I don’t think love and fucking should mix.”

“Why? Because someone broke your heart?”

“My heart can’t be broken…love is bullshit.” She says it sharply, the nerve having been properly hit.

I don’t want to be here, watching this poor, unsure stranger attempt to project her fantasy-self. There was a time when I would feel this way due to a desire to be in the presence of a different, more familiar stranger, one from the past or my mind, but now it just saddens me, because while I don’t want to be here, I can’t think of anywhere else I want to be.

“Get real with yourself,” I say with a nose laugh. “We’re conditioned to want to believe otherwise. We pretend like we don’t because we want to give the illusion that we’re free and to shore ourselves up for failure.”

“You are just like Jack,” she says with a laugh. The comparison jolts me, and the thought occurs that perhaps I’m taking it out on her because I see myself.

“I’m just saying…no one who truly believes that love is bullshit watches Regis.”

“Coming from the unemployed guy who threw up on my walkway last night, I’ll take that as gospel.”

“Believe it, sister.” I raise my eyebrows and crack a smile. Dance, monkey, dance.

“You’re a lot wittier when you’re sober.”

“Direct result of being much more afraid.”

There’s all sorts of ways for our type to express biting and sarcastic views on our sorrow, and we often pat ourselves on the back for the clever but cowardly cat-and-mouse dialogue we construct. But right now I feel like I’d rather just cry into my coffee. That would seem much less sad than this.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“I left the door with twenty bucks last night and I’m afraid it ended up on your walkway.”

“I can make it here.” She looks like the type who eats out constantly – hungover breakfasts, lunch plans and sushi dinners with suitors, gay friends, girlfriends, etc. I imagine the venture would probably end in porous smoke and burnt eggs, something that I would’ve found deliriously endearing four years ago.

“Think I’m going to have to pass,” I say, dumping the dregs of my coffeecup down the drain. “Thank you, though.”

“Well, do you have plans? We could see a movie or wander around.” This is heartbreaking.

“Uh…to be honest I think I’ll just take you up on the ride home. It has nothing to do with you…I actually enjoy our conversation, and appreciate your hospitality. I just, uh…I’m not going to pretend that I have plans. I’m just in a place where I’d prefer being alone. I’m kind of a wreck.”

“Fair enough.” I’m not sure if her nodding is a sign of understanding or a concurrence that I’m likely insane. “Give me a few minutes to change and we can go.”

The ride home is mostly silent, and I want to apologize for who I am, but I merely nod my head with the beat of the music.