Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story – Read Now and Download Mobi

THE DAY BEFORE THE FIRST DAY

New York    Dead Horses    Looking for Nothing

I am not qualified to live here.

I don’t know what qualifications are necessary to live in any certain place at any given time, but I know I don’t have them.

Ohio. I was qualified to live in Ohio. I like high school football. I enjoy Chinese buffet restaurants. I think the Pretenders’ first record is okay. Living in Ohio was not outside my wheel-house. But this place they call New York…this place that Lou Reed incessantly described to no one in particular…this place is more complicated. Everything is a grift, and everyone is a potential grifter. Before moving to Manhattan, I had only been here twice. Two days before I finally packed up my shit and left Akron, I had a phone conversation with the man who would be my immediate supsecurities. He tried to explain what my life here would be like; at the time, the only details I could remember about my two trips to New York were that (a) the bars didn’t close until 4 A.M., and (b) there seemed to be an inordinate number of attractive women skulking about the street. “Don’t let that fool you,” my editor said as he (theoretically) stroked his Clapton-like beard. “I grew up in Minnesota, and I initially thought all the women in New York were beautiful, too. But here’s the thing—a lot of them are just cute girls from the Midwest who get expensive haircuts and spend too much time at the gym.” This confused me, because that seems to be the definition of what a beautiful woman is. However, I have slowly come to understand my bearded editor’s pretzel logic: Sexuality is 15 percent real and 85 percent illusion. The first time I was here, it was February. I kept seeing thin women waiting for taxicabs, and they were all wearing black turtlenecks, black mittens, black scarves, and black stocking caps…but no jackets. None of them wore jackets. It was 28 degrees. That attire (particularly within the context of such climatic conditions) can make any woman electrifying. Most of them were holding cigarettes, too. That always helps. I don’t care what C. Everett Koop thinks. Smoking is usually a good decision.

Spin magazine is on the third floor of an office building on Lexington Avenue, a street often referred to as “Lex” by cast members of Law & Order. It is always the spring of 1996 in the offices of Spin; it will be the spring of 1996 forever. Just about everybody who works there looks like either (a) a member of the band Pavement, or (b) a girl who once dated a member of the band Pavement. The first time I walked into the office, three guys were talking about J Mascis for no apparent reason, and one of them was describing his guitar noodling as “trenchant.” They had just returned from lunch. It was 3:30 P.M. I was the fifth-oldest person in the entire editorial department; I was 29.

I’m working on an untitled death project, and you are reading said project. Today, I will leave the offices of Spin and go to the Chelsea Hotel. Once I arrive there, I will ask people about the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, a woman whose ultra-annoying shriek was immortalized in the 1986 film Sid & Nancy. The “Sid” in that equation was (of course) Sid Vicious, the fabulously moronic bass player for the Sex Pistols and the alleged murderer of Nancy. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed Sid & Nancy on their TV show At the Movies the week the film was released, and it was the first time I ever heard of the Sex Pistols. At the time, the Sex Pistols didn’t interest me at all; I liked Van Halen. In 1987, a kid in my school told me I should listen to the Sex Pistols because they had an album called Flogging a Dead Horse, which was the kind of phrase I would have found noteworthy as a sophomore in high school. However, I didn’t follow his advice; I liked Tesla. In 1989, I bought Never Mind the Bollocks on cassette because it was on sale, and it reminded me of Guns N’ Roses. Johnny Rotten had an antiabortion song called “Bodies,” yet he still aspired to be the Antichrist. This struck me as commonsense conservatism.

The chorus of the song “Pretty Vacant” is playing inside my skull as I saunter through the Spin offices, but it sounds as if the vocals are being sung by Gavin Rfeeding off the unhappiness. It becomes darkly interesting. Supposedly, Sid (as a 16-year-old) once told his mother, “Mum, I don’t know what people see in sex. I don’t get anything out of it.” That sentiment explains everything. If you find sex unsatisfying, you need something to take its place. You need a problem. Nancy was a good problem for Sid. Heroin was also a good problem for Sid. The only problem is that good problems are still problems, and Mr. Vicious was just not designed for problem solving. His genius scheme was to move himself and Nancy into Room 100 of the Chelsea in August of ’78, where they could stay high for the rest of their lives. This kind of (but not really) worked for two months, until he (almost certainly) stabbed Nancy, who was wearing only a bra and panties, and watched her bleed to death underneath the bathroom sink. Vicious purposefully OD’d on smack before the case ever went to trial, so I suppose we’ll never really know what happened in that room, though he did tell the police, “I did it because I’m a dirty dog.” This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one.”

When I finally walk into the Chelsea, I can’t decide if I’m impressed or underwhelmed; I can’t tell if this place is nicer or crappier than I anticipated (I guess I had no preconceived notion). There are two men behind the reception desk: an older man with a beard and a younger man who might be Hispanic. I ask the bearded man if anyone is staying in Room 100, and—if it’s unoccupied—if I can see what it looks like.

“There is no Room 100,” he tells me. “They converted it into an apartment 18 years ago. But I know why you’re asking.”

For the next five minutes, these two gentlemen and I have a conversation about Sid Vicious, mostly focused on how he was an idiot. However, there are certainly lots of people who disagree with us: Patrons constantly come to this hotel with the hope of staying in the same flat where an unlikable, opportunistic woman named Nancy was murdered for no valid reason. The staff is not thrilled by this tradition (“We hate it when people ask about this,” says the younger employee. “Be sure you write that down: We hate it when people ask us about this.”). I ask the bearded gentleman what kind of person aspires to stay in a hotel room that was once a crime scene.

“It tends to be younger people—the kind of people with colored hair. But we did have one guy come all the way from Japan, only to discover that Room 100 doesn’t even exist anymore. The thing is, Johnny Rotten was a musician; Sid Vicious was a loser. So maybe his fans want to be losers, too.”

While we are having this discussion, an unabashedly annoyed man interjects himself into the dialogue; this man is named Stanley Bard, and he has been the manager of the Chelsea Hotel for more than 40 years. He does not want me talking to the hotel staff and asks me into his first-floor office. Bard is balding and swarthy and serious, and he sternly tells me I should not include the Chelsea Hotel in this article.

“I understand what you think you are trying to do, but I do not want the Chelsea Hotel associated with this story,” says Bard, his arms crossed as he sits behind a cluttered wooden desk. “Sid Vicious didn’t die here. It was just his girlfriend, and she was of no consequence. The kind of person who wants to stay in Room 100 is just a cult DAY

Diane    Hippies    Ithaca    The Hand of Doom

Let me begin with a confession: I’m lying. Not to you or to the world, but to my striking blonde editor at Spin; she thinks I’m driving straight from New York to West Warwick, Rhode Island, to “investigate” the Great White club tragedy. I am actually driving to Ithaca, New York, with a woman, solely because this woman asked me to take her there and I immediately said yes.

Traveling to Ithaca might seem harmless, but it’s actually a metaphor. In fact, there may be a day in the near future when you find yourself in a conversation about this book, and someone will ask you what the story is really about, beyond the rudimentary narrative of a cross-country death trip based on a magazine article. And it’s very likely you will say, “Well, the larger thesis is somewhat underdeveloped, but there is this point early in the story where he takes a woman to Ithaca for no real reason, and it initially seems innocuous, but—as you keep reading—you sort of see how this behavior is a self-perpetuating problem that keeps reappearing over and over again.” In all probability, you will also complain about the author’s reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness, which will prompt the person you’re conversing with to criticize the influence of Dave Eggers on the memoir-writing genre. Then your cell phone will ring, and you will agree to meet someone for brunch.

But ANYWAY, the woman I am taking to Ithaca is named Diane. She works with me at Spin, although not directly. As of right now, I am in love with her, and that love is the biggest problem in my life. It’s the only problem in my life, really. And by this time tomorrow, I will have given Diane an ultimatum about our future together, which is ironic because I will do this in response to an ultimatum given to me by a different woman who lives in Minnesota (a woman who has yet to be introduced into the story). So—ultimately—that will be the crux of this book: I will be driving across the country with two ultimatums hanging in the balance, delivered to (and from) two different women who have never met each other. And the larger irony will be that neither of these women will be the central female character in the narrative; that will actually be a third woman, but she will never tangibly appear anywhere in this entire book.

So ANYWAY, Diane is enchanting, and she is sleeping on the right side of the bed right now, unaware that I am typing about my love for her.

For the first 15 hours of our secret excursion, there has been little talk of death between Diane and myself. It’s mostly just driving, eating hot pork sandwiches in diners, reading The New York Times aloud, skipping stones across shallow rivers, playful banter over issues that aren’t actually issues, and better-than-average physical collisions on a feather bed in the Rose comfortable; staying in a room that seems like a honeymoon suite makes it hard for her to pretend that we’re not actually dating, although she is certainly still trying. This is something she does constantly, despite the fact that (a) we spend all our time together, (b) we sporadically see each other naked, and (c) I pay for pretty much everything, pretty much all the time. But as I said, I will explain all this later. The bottom line is that we are having a wonderful time together, and I really wish she was coming along on this trip. However, after our night in Ithaca, we will need to drive to Lake Ontario because Diane is going camping with a bunch of hippies she met at a food co-op during college. She does this once a year. Diane is something of an urban hippie. She actually listens to electronica, the last musical subculture in which hippies still thrive (they all take drugs and listen to terrible, overlong music while talking about ridiculous ideas like “community” and “sharing the love”). Diane wants to overthrow the government and blow up Nike factories, but I blame those interests on her parents. She’s quite clever, and she looks like the woman described by Dolly Parton in the song “Jolene”: ivory skin, emerald eyes, and an avalanche of auburn hair. Diane’s hair is astounding: It’s thick and red and relentless (sort of like Axl Rose in the “Welcome to the Jungle” video, only natural). She is the anti-Medusa. If push came to shove, I would probably help her blow up a Nike factory if it meant I could spend 20 minutes playing with her Jew-fro.

You would be fascinated by the myriad components of Diane’s life, were I so inclined to explain them; it’s an unfathomable collection of events, all things considered. And when I say “all things,” I truly mean the entire spectrum of existence: her ex-boyfriend, her father, Bowling Green University, the role of women in the media, Judaism, her ex-boyfriend, hydroelectric fossil fuel alternatives, an ill-fated stint in the Peace Corps, Kraftwerk, Pedro Martinez, the Internet, a grizzly bear who attacked her car four years ago, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, competitive speed chess, the principles that once governed the Soviet Union, and her ex-boyfriend. However, all that stuff is her life; that stuff has nothing to do with me, really, and it would be wrong for me to comment on anything that doesn’t affect me directly (in fact, it’s probably wrong for me to even comment on the things that do affect me directly, since she’s obviously a real person who probably did not expect to end up in a book when she first kissed me, although—by this point—I have to assume any woman who kisses me halfway expects I’ll eventually write about her in some capacity, since I always do). But here are the bare bones of what you need to know in order to understand this story: Diane ended a long-term relationship and was very sad, and I found her sadness electrically attractive. I tend to equate sadness with intelligence. I met Diane when I was deeply, deeply obsessed with being in New York, and she seemed to embody New York with the very fabric of her existence. We talked and talked and e-mailed and e-mailed and drank and drank and drank, and she told me not to fall in love with her, and I fell in love with her in something like 19 days. That was seven months ago. However, things have never really changed since the first time we got drunk together; this has never become a conventional relationship. In fact, one could argue that this hasn’t been a relationship at all: I can count the number of times we’ve slept together on one hand. She has never been my girlfriend their veins, or that they have lost their soul. However, the ultimate manifestation of Cotard’s syndrome (classified medically as a nihilistic delusional disorder) is the victim’s unshakable conviction that he does not exist. It is not that these people fear they are dying; it’s that they are certain they are already dead.

Sometimes the victims of Cotard’s syndrome think they can smell their own flesh rotting. I must concede that this has never happened to me. I probably don’t have full-on Cotard’s, but there are moments when I feel like I’m dead. This is especially true when I’m in airports. Anytime I’m in a foreign place with lots of strangers who all share an identical (yet completely unrelated) purpose, I start to think I’m in purgatory. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a theory that life on earth is purgatory, because life on earth seems to have all the purgatorial qualities that were once described to me by nuns. It’s almost like we’re all Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, but nobody on “earth” has figured this out yet, even though it will suddenly seem obvious when we get to the end. Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence; for example, infants who die from SIDS were actually great people when they were alive “for real,” so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile, anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning 102 was obviously a terrible individual who had many, many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her unknown purgatory (even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world). This hypothesis becomes especially clear inside any airport. It’s like a warehouse full of dead people rushing from gate to gate to gate, all of whom are unaware that—if they are lucky—they will have the good fortune to board a 727 that crashes into a mountain. Then they’ll be out of purgatory.

Those other people don’t know they’re dead, though. They think they’re alive, wordlessly walking through the airport and chomping down three-dollar Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. I might be the only one who’s aware of this, which means I am quite possibly a prophet. It also means I quite possibly have Cotard’s syndrome. It’s always 50-50.

 

Now, this next part is kind of important.

Diane and I are in the Tauntan, and the sky is overcast (but just barely). It’s mid-afternoon, and I suspect we will make it to Lake Ontario by 7:30. After refueling outside of Syracuse, Diane begs me to let her drive, even though she no longer possesses a driver’s license. I give her the keys. She pulls onto the interstate, and I say this:

“Diane, I want to be clear about something,” I begin, “and I want this to be the last time we have this conversation.”

Diane keeps driving, but she raises her eyebrows.

“I can’t handle this anymore,” I say. “I have been very clear about my feelings toward you. I have run out of ways to say I love you. So this is it. You have three weeks.”

“I have three weeks to do what?”

“You have three weeks to decide if you want to be with me. And if your answer is that you do not want to be with me, I don’t want to hang out with you, ever.”

Silence.

“C’re not having sex with, which is something you can just as easily think about when you’re completely alone.

Now—granted—Diane is not b, and Lenore is not c. Diane is not actually my girlfriend, and Lenore lives 2,000 miles to the west. But there is a reason talking about being in love with Diane makes me think of Lenore, and it’s the same reason I was thinking about Diane a few weeks ago when I kissed Lenore good-bye and told her I’d see her in a month.

The density of my relationship with Lenore cannot be overstated.

If Diane is like the woman from the song “Jolene,” Lenore is like a combination of the girl described in “Chantilly Lace” (minus the ponytail) and the individual depicted in Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill” (although not technically bulletproof). I met her at a party in Fargo, North Dakota; actually, I didn’t meet her. I saw her. About 15 of us were watching the documentary Unzipped, and she arrived late and spent 10 minutes trying to open a bottle of wine. We never spoke. Three days later, I sent an e-mail to my friend Sarah Jackson. All the message said was, “I don’t know who that blonde girl was, but she is superfoxy x 1,000.” Sarah forwarded this message to Lenore, which (of course) was precisely my plan; anytime you tell a woman something positive about one of her female friends, the friend will be informed of this statement within 48 hours. I had no real aspirations of dating Lenore when I did this, because that seemed absolutely impossible. We were not, as they say, in the same league (she was in the NBA and I had a 10-day contract with the Quad City Thunder). But this is something all men do: Men always want to make sure that attractive women are informed of the fact that they are, in fact, attractive. I have no idea why this happens, but it happens all the time. I guess it’s the hope that—somewhere on earth and against all odds—there is a beautiful woman who has managed to live her entire life without anyone mentioning that she has a desirable physical appearance, and this singular comment will be so flattering that no other courtship will be necessary. I knew a guy in college who only dated freshmen; when I asked him why, he said, “Because I exclusively hit on very hot women, and I don’t want to meet anyone who has been told she is beautiful more than 20 or 30 times in the course of her lifetime. By the time any semi-attractive woman has completed one-third of her junior year, she’s been told she’s beautiful 4 million times by 3 million guys, 2 million of whom were drunk when they said it.” I believe this fellow majored in statistics and is now divorced.

But ANYWAY, Sarah Jackson started dragging Lenore into the vinyl bar booth that I essentially lived in, and we started hard-core, bone-crushing, kamikaze flirting. This was 1996, when the world was without problems. Every Tuesday night, we would banter and drink and attempt to create national catchphrases, most notably the memorable axiom “Don’t get nervous,” an expression that generally meant “Our life is not going to get any better than this.” Sometimes we would dance to Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva,” but we’d do so in a manner that resembled awkward attacks from bipedal grizzly bears. One night we were bear-dancing in front of the jukebox (the bar had no sanctioned dance floor), and I pulled her into an alcove that led to the basement. It was a little five-by-five-foot foyer with green walls and a nonworking pay phondown.

The sun begins to set. Diane and I hug each other and look at Lake Ontario for 10 minutes while drinking warm Labatts from the Tauntan’s trunk, and then she tells me I should get going. Which I do, although I feel vaguely guilty about leaving. I drive back to the east, into the darkness. It’s an easy drive; I listen to the Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, and then a talk-radio show that’s inexplicably focused on what’s been happening at the Denver Broncos training camp (we should all expect big things from Clinton Portis, it seems). Three hours later, Diane calls me on my cell phone; I’m in Room No. 5 of the Red Carpet Inn in Mohawk, New York, which is where I’m typing this very sentence at this very moment. She sounds okay, but not so okay that she didn’t need to call. It’s only a five-minute conversation, mostly about how Diane wants to fall asleep. Meanwhile, my motel has walls so thin that I can hear a family of three playing Yahtzee in the next room. I can hear every detail of the game. I can hear the dice shaking in the tumbler, and I suddenly want to hear Exile on Main St. The walls are so thin that I can actually keep score of the Yahtzee game in my head; the mom should have kept her “fives” instead of filling in her “chance” space so early in the game. You can always pick up “chance” at the end.

THE THIRD DAY

Fire    Metal    Drugs    Despair    Q

SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, the road signs say. I am one exit away from the Basketball Hall of Fame, and I suddenly feel obligated to check it out; I won’t stay long, but I want to call my friends in Minnesota and tell them I’m looking at Bobby Knight’s sweater. Springfield is a poorly organized town, but I eventually find the Hall of Fame (the building is spherical, so that kinda helps). Like all museums, it’s a rip-off. I care about basketball with an intensity I feel toward little else in my life, but I still find scant satisfaction from looking at Artis Gilmore’s ABA jersey through a plate of Plexiglas.

In theory, the Basketball Hall of Fame should simply serve as a pleasant distraction from the road and an opportunity to buy a T-shirt. I certainly didn’t think it would factor into this story. But something depressing happens while I’m here. The bottom floor of the Hall of Fame is a full-length basketball court with a regulation wooden floor, and there are iron hoops and leather spheroids everywhere. Any museum patron can take an elevator down to court level and shoot free throws and three-pointers and skyhooks; you can even try to shoot into a peach basket, just like the students of Dr. James Naismith in December 1891. I cannot resist an opportunity to squeeze off a few mid-range jump shots, even though I had not touched a rock in two years; the cacophony of 100 balls bouncing semi-simultaneously reminded me of going to basketball camp in seventh grade. But as I launch my leather rock alongside three black kids and a teenage Asian girl, something slowly dawns on me: I’m fucking terrible. Most of my shots are off b.

“I recognized a lot of the faces when they were on the news. The same people came here every night,” Richardson says. “When a band like Great White or Warrant would come to town, all those same people would come out. There was never any pretentiousness at this club. This was the one club where you wouldn’t have to worry about some drunk guy yelling about how much your band sucked. The people who came here were never like that.”

To me, that’s what makes the Great White tragedy even sadder than it logically was: One can safely assume that none of the 100 people who died at the Station that night were trying to be cool by watching Great White play 20-year-old songs. This was not a bunch of hipsters trying to be seen by other hipsters; these were blue-collar people, all trying to unironically experience music that honestly meant something to them when they were teenagers. So many of the rock concerts I’ve attended have been filled with people who were there only to be there, who just wanted to be seen by other people who were there only to be there. They want to be able to say, “I saw the Vines at the Mercury Lounge before they released Highly Evolved, and they already sucked.” They want to say, “I saw the Strokes right before they started to get serious, and it was amazing.” They want to say, “I saw Jane’s Addiction on the Nothing’s Shocking tour, and I thought I was seeing the new Zeppelin. It was amazing. But then I saw them again, and they sucked.” Half the people who attend concerts only go so that they can tell other people that (a) certain shows were amazing, and (b) other shows sucked. But that couldn’t have been the case at the Station. I remember everyone gossiping about the Station fire the day after it happened; people would concede that it was tragic, but no one could discuss it without a fraction of a smirk. People were sending e-mail one-liners about the fire while the cops were still counting the bodies. Somehow, it was acceptable to condescendingly chuckle at the death of the overtly uncool people in Rhode Island, sort of how you can immediately make a joke about a massive earthquake as long as it happens in some distant place like Iran or China. I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it. It’s almost like they want to be burned alive, because that would prove they had grit.

Tonight, I will go back to the Station graveyard at 11:00 P.M., and lots of working-class survivors will pull up in Camaro IROCs and Chevy Cavaliers, and they’ll sit in the vortex of the crosses and smoke menthol cigarettes and marijuana, and they will talk about what happened that night. I will be told that the fire started during the first song (“Desert Moon,” off Hooked). I will be told that the Station’s ceiling was only 10 feet high and covered in synthetic foam, and when the foam ignited, it (supposedly) released cyanide into the air. I will be told it took exactly 58 seconds before the whole building became a singular fireball. I will be told that one of the kids who died had just turned 21 and was “a great fucking golfer.” I will be told that a few firefighters at the scene compared it to seeing napalm dropped on villages in Vietnam, because that was the only other time they had ever seen skin dripping off bone.

I will also be told (by just about everyone in the entire town) that Great White vocalist Jack Russell is a coward and a hypocrite, and that they will never forgive him. Around 1: house, and I would have to mow its lawn. I’d probably mow the lawn catty-corner, because that usually looks better. In the spring, I’d clean wet leaves from the eaves trough, but maybe that would be satisfying, somehow. Maybe I would find a Zen relationship within those wet leaves. If I had to live this life, I could make it work, you know?

Two minutes later, Quincy told me she was not pregnant.

She walked out of my bathroom and dropped to her knees. We exchanged high fives, which in retrospect seems like a peculiar response. We then decided to get as stoned as humanly possible and videotape ourselves talking about nonsense, which was the one thing we loved to do more than anything else (including, curiously, the thing that led me to buy her a pregnancy test). Our bong had an American flag on it because Quincy liked to champion representative democracy; we always filled it with ice cubes because I liked to champion the properties of ice. After 20 minutes of arguing over the comedic merit of the phrase powder monkey, Quincy slowly determined that our cigarette lighter was broken. It was February, and we were in North Dakota. The idea of driving to a convenience store to buy a new lighter seemed absolutely impossible.

“Why don’t you ask one of your neighbors?” Quincy said. “Maybe they have an extra lighter.”

“You are a genius,” I replied. “I will save the day for all involved. But what should I say we need a lighter for?”

“Say anything,” said Q.

I walked out into the hallway and confidently pounded on the door of a man who lived two doors down. Like all modern people, I had no relationship with anyone in my building. The man who opened the door was roughly 33 years old. He was wearing a wife-beater and watching Cheers. For some reason, I felt this man could not be trusted.

“Hey there,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I live on this floor—we’re neighbors, as you may or may not know—and I will be entertaining some guests this evening, and many of these people are cigarette smokers, so I was wondering if you had a cigarette lighter I could borrow.”

This came out less fluently than I had anticipated.

“Oh. Hmm. Well, that seems reasonable,” he said. “But if these people smoke, won’t they bring their own lighters?”

This was a good point.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it just seems like smokers who carry around cigarettes usually carry around cigarette lighters, too,” he said. “Or at least some matches.”

“Well, yes. Usually, that’s true,” I replied. “But I also own many candles.”

This made even less sense, but he gave me a lighter and told me I didn’t even need to return it. I triumphantly returned to my apartment and relayed the details of this exchange to the Q.

“So let me see if I grasp our scenario,” Quincy said. “You essentially lied to this guy, just as I instructed. But the particular lie you selected was that you are having a huge party in this tiny apartment on a Thursday night, and the party will be populated with shortsighted cigarette smokers, and he is not invited. And just in case he isn’t already freaked out by this, you also mentioned that this tiny, crowded apartment will be filled with burning candles.”

“This is all true,” I said, “but the ends justify the means. You cannot deny that we now have a working cigarette lighter. Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect. think about how weird it is that I can recall borrowing a cigarette lighter more vividly than I can recall how my entire existence almost changed completely. After I moved to Akron, I used to get drunk and think to myself, “Jesus Christ, if Q had been pregnant, I’d remember that night for the rest of my life.”

Which I did anyway.

It will be more than a little awesome to see Quincy.

THE FOURTH DAY

Crazy    In    Love

There is a new song on Top 40 radio right now that’s so good I want to kill myself. I’m not sure why exceptionally good hip-hop singles make me want to commit suicide, but they often do. I don’t know what the title of this song is, but it’s that religious woman with the perfect stomach from Destiny’s Child and Jay-Z doing a duet featuring a horn riff from the ’70s that I’ve never heard before (but that sounds completely familiar), and the chorus is something along the lines of, “Your love is driving me crazy right now / I’m kind of hoping you’ll page me right now.” It’s also possible that Jay-Z compares himself to Golden State Warriors guard Nick Van Exel during the last verse, but I can’t be positive.

ANYWAY, by the time you read this sentence, the song I am referring to will be ten thousand years old. You will have heard it approximately 15,000 times, and you might hate it, and I might hate it, too. But right now—today—I am living for this song. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing that matters as much as hearing it on the radio; I am interested in nothing beyond Beyoncé Knowles’s voice. All I do is scan the FM dial for hours at a time, trying to find it. And you know what? I’ve never heard the entire song once. I never catch the beginning. But I’ve heard the end about 25 times, and it makes me want to drive my Tauntan into the mouth of an active volcano.

If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes. When I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation in 1995, I remember being impressed that she intended to play “Strawberry Fields Forever” if she ultimately slit her wrists in the bathtub, opting for the Beatles instead of her own personal Jesus, Bruce Springsteen. I guess this was so that no one would blame her suicide on “Thunder Road,” which is similar to what happened to Judas Priest in 1985. Years after reading Prozac Nation, I actually met Wurtzel (for maybe five minutes) in the offices of Spin magazine, and I told her that I had always liked that particular passage from her book. She told me she had no recollection of writing such a sentiment but conceded that it sounded like something she would have written. It was an awkward conversation; in the span of those five minutes, I think I said 14 words, while Wurtzel unleashed somewhere in the vicinity of 82,000 complete sentences. She is a conversational avalanche. I found myself both repulsed and attracted, which probably happens to her a lot. She had nice hips. After the conversation, I walked over to the desk of Lucy Chance, a 11 the truth, and I’m lying.

THE FIFTH DAY

Breakdown    Downtown    Dear Catastrophe Waitress

I started watching a made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime network, but I had to stop after 10 minutes. This happened late last night. I could immediately sense that it was part of a particular genre of film I can’t handle; it was one of those “Nobody Believes Me” movies. This idiom includes films like Harrison Ford’s Frantic and Kurt Russell’s Breakdown: They are narratives in which something terrible happens to the main character (such as having his wife kidnapped), but everyone the character tries to notify assumes he’s insane. Whenever I watch a movie like this, I get nervous. I always feel like I’m about to vomit.

Though my physical response to this type of movie is strange, it’s not exactly rare. Lots of people have specific cinema phobias that stop them from enjoying certain movies. Lucy Chance, for example, can’t watch movies that depict TV game shows. This is an especially unique foible, because Lucy enjoys watching real game shows; she only dislikes fictionalized interpretations of such programs. As a consequence, she refuses to see films like Magnolia (whose plot includes a game show called What Do Kids Know?), Quiz Show (about the seminal TV game Twenty-one), and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which includes fake footage of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show). I’m not sure what this says about her personality. I have another friend who hates any movie in which a character unexpectedly rides a horse; as a result, he hates The Last Boy Scout (where Damon Wayans rides a horse onto a football field), The Song Remains the Same (where Robert Plant travels by steed on a Viking challenge), and even Raiders of the Lost Ark (where Indiana Jones steals an equine to chase down the Nazi caravan). Oddly, this fellow has absolutely no problem with movies that involve “predictable” horse riding, such as Young Guns and Seabiscuit. I don’t know what that symbolizes, either. However, I fully understand why I become so emotionally shackled by the “Nobody Believes Me” oeuvre of filmmaking: I empathize too much with the protagonist. This is how I feel all the time. Whenever I try to be ironic, people think I’m serious—but every time I’m actually right about something, everyone assumes I’m crazy. Nobody ever believes me when I’m telling the truth. If I ever get married, I’ll live in constant fear that my wife will fall into the hands of sadistic kidnappers. I just know I’d be profoundly fucked if that ever happened. The authorities would never buy my story.

 

I’m lost. I know where I am, but I’m still lost.

As previously noted, my car is specially equipped with a device that is supposed to stop this from happening. But this is still happening. I tried to get on the interstate, but I (somehow) ended up in the heart of Washington, D.C. Is it possible a GPS doesn’t work within the perimeter

Artists who believe they have any control over the interpretation of their work are completely fooling themselves.

 

Like most humans, I need food. Unlike most humans, I need food right now, lest I consume the living flesh of my own left hand. I’m Donner Party hungry. Utilizing the keypad of my GPS, I punch the words Olive Garden into the computer system. I do this for two reasons. For one, the Olive Garden is good; it always makes me happy. But the second reason is because the Olive Garden is “in the news,” sort of. There is currently a popular reality-television show called The Bachelor, and it just aired a classic TV moment that is (apparently) unspeakably uproarious: A contestant named Amber was having dinner with the aforementioned Bachelor (tire heir Andrew Firestone), and she asked him, “What’s your favorite restaurant chain? I like the Olive Garden.” This, you see, is funny, because…well, I’m not sure why this is funny, to tell you the truth. And I’m not sure anybody else in America knows, either, but it still got mentioned in Entertainment Weekly.

This happens all the time: Americans seem to know what’s funny, but they don’t know why. I suppose some people would say, “This exchange was funny because the Olive Garden sucks,” but that insight isn’t really funny, you know? Why would going to a bad restaurant be funny? Still, everyone I know (myself included) seems well aware that this quote is unspeakably amusing, even though there’s no explanation as to why. People behave this way all the time; we all sign a social contract that requires us to universally ridicule certain sentiments on principle, even though no such principle exists. When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid in fifth grade whom everyone called Ippy, a nickname that was supposed to be a combination of the words imp and hippy (the origin of this moniker remains unclear—it was possibly due to an unorthodox haircut). Ippy was precocious and clever and popular, inasmuch as any fifth grader can be popular. He could draw exceptionally and was well known for his pencil sketches of military aircraft.

But then Ippy became a sixth grader. And then—all of a sudden and for no valid reason—everyone decided they hated him.

For the next two years, Ippy was mercilessly attacked on a daily basis. Almost nobody talked to him, unless they were trying to trick him into drinking a can of Mountain Dew that was half filled with piss. I remember two kids stealing his gym shoes and dropping them into the locker room whirlpool. People would throw half-chewed food at the back of his head while he worked on math problems. This was real horror-show, Welcome to the Dollhouse shit, and it emerged out of nowhere. He had done nothing to warrant this. Moreover, the torture ended as capriciously as it began: Halfway through his eighth-grade year, Ippy was completely reabsorbed into the junior high coolness coven. Everyone liked him again, although (for reasons unknown) he was no longer called Ippy; now his nickname was “Caveman,” which had to do with the fact that he was the only eighth grader who needed to regularly shave.

Looking back, I have to believe those two years were unspeakably traumatizing for good ol’ Ippy. I mean, his experience is retrospectively traumatizing for me, and I barely participated in the unexplained hazing. The thing that Iit happened. How could everyone cruelly agree on something that could not be justified by anyone? It wasn’t the fear of retribution; there were kids in my school so popular that no one would have turned against them no matter who they did—or did not—befriend (in fact, the one kid who never betrayed Ippy—the photogenic, Skoal-chomping quarterback on our junior high football team—suffered no social stigma whatsoever). And it was more than just mob mentality. Something made all of us believe Ippy was a pariah. In fact, I can distinctly recall thinking, “I obviously must hate this kid,” even though I didn’t; I had shared a school bus seat with Ippy for seven years, and I always thought he was cool (in fact, when I was in third grade, I madly envied his Ace Frehley doll). But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re sharing a reality that doesn’t exist. Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they’re going to hate. Every day, shows like Access Hollywood force 2 million housewives to ask themselves, “Who really cares who Lindsay Lohan is dating?” And you know what the answer to that question is? Almost no one. There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing. This is what they’re afraid of, and this is how they deduce societal truth. And that’s the same fear that made me hate a totally friendly person from 1985 to 1986: It somehow made sense to hate him. This is also why it seems weird not to laugh at a woman on reality TV who likes the Olive Garden. It somehow makes sense to laugh at what isn’t funny.

I can’t wait for those fucking breadsticks.

 

This is not exactly a good story, but it’s a good “nonstory”: This afternoon, I’m rolling south on I-85 when I see an exit sign. The exit sign reads, CHINA GROVE. The sign (of course) makes me wonder if this is the town the Doobie Brothers sang about in the 1973 hit “China Grove.” I take the exit and drive down Main Street; China Grove is a community of maybe 3,200 people, and the city’s only Italian restaurant—a place called the Italian Grove—has a sign out front advertising the town’s best buffalo wings (the South is awesome). I’m looking around for…well, I don’t know what I’m looking around for, to be honest. Perhaps a statue of “Skunk” Baxter. I’m trying to sing “China Grove” in my head (in the hope of coming up with a few other geographic clues), but I can’t remember any of the words except for the part that goes, “Whoa oh, China Grove!” I finally stumble across a guitar shop called Coleman’s Music, so I park the Tauntan and step inside to ask for advice. I am greeted by a man behind the counter with a gray ponytail and a Hawaiian shirt that’s open to the fifth button; he is conversing with a bald patron and a dude with radically long hair (possibly an employee) who looks like he should be in the fucking Doobie Brothers.

The person behind the counter is the owner, Chip Coleman. I ask him my query.

“What I always tell people when they ask me this—and I’ve been asked that question seven or eight times a weeke path forks: One trail remains flat, the other goes up a hill. I take the hill. I’m Jerry Rice. I’m Sergei Bubka. I’m Franka Potente. This is perfect. But as my legs pump like grand prix pistons, and as I physically dominate this inanimate mound of red earth, my mind drifts to a slightly darker question: If I died right here, how long would it take for people to find out?

Let’s pretend I had a heart attack halfway up this hill (or let’s say I conquered the hill and got struck by a rogue bolt of the aforementioned lightning). Certainly, no one would find me tonight; this path is underused and the sky is rapidly fading to black. I suspect someone would find my body tomorrow morning. But I’m wearing running clothes, and I’m carrying no identification, and I’m at least two miles from the hotel; the authorities probably wouldn’t figure out who I was until the day after tomorrow. Using the information from my rental car, they’d call Spin early on Wednesday morning. But nobody ever shows up at the Spin offices until 10:30 A.M., so they’d just leave a phone message.

Now, the first person who gets to Spin every day is a Bouncing Souls fan named Caryn, but I doubt she would return this call; she’d just tell the managing editor that we received a message from a cop in North Carolina. Our managing editor would call the authorities that afternoon; she’d then inform Sia about what had transpired, and then there would be a meeting in Sia’s office. In this meeting, everybody would find out I was dead. I think several people would cry, but definitely not everybody. Work would be dismissed for the afternoon, unless we were closing an issue. Someone would have to call my parents, but probably not Sia; I suspect Sia would be crying a lot. Calling my mom would be the managing editor’s job. Meanwhile, Spin reviews editor Alex Pappademas would take the responsibility of informing my roommates that I was dead, because Alex could get my roommate Michael’s cell phone number from our mutual friend Farrin (these relationships grow incredibly complicated when you start to think about them realistically). My Manhattan roommates, Michael and David, would have no idea who to contact, but I suspect Michael would call my editor at Scribner, our ex-coworker David Giffels in Akron, and possibly Sarah Jackson (who now lives in Olympia, Washington), because Michael and Sarah dated three years ago (and I assume he still has her number). Sarah would immediately tell my buddy Ross, and Ross would inherit the obligation of informing just about everyone else who’s ever met me. Then again, my sister-in-law in North Dakota knows the father of my college friend Jon Blixt, so perhaps Jon would find out (via his father) the day after my mom was phoned by our managing editor. Jon would then tell two people (Mike Schauer and Mr. Pancake), and the three of them would have to do all the expository work. Jon would actually be terrific at this; he’s very efficient. I bet he could make all the necessary calls in less than two hours.

Since she works in the office, Diane would find out about my termination at the initial Spin meeting, unless Sia told her privately beforehand. Lenore would be informed by Ross, and I bet she would wear black at my funeral; this is excellent, because Lenore looks amazingly hot in black. Quincy might not find out for weeks, unless Mr. Pancake still has her e-mail address (which I doubt). Q would probably miss my funeral. One of my closest drinking compani’t know about it.

I don’t want to die, but I certainly adore the idea of being dead. I know it’s pathetic to enjoy the notion of your friends calling each other to discuss your untimely demise, but I love it. Maybe Spin would dedicate an issue to me. Maybe they would run a one-page obituary, which would be written by either Alex or senior editor Jon Dolan. Maybe they’d each get to write blurbs about me; this would be fascinating because they both have unique blurbing styles. Jon would likely compare me to some dead genius I’ve never even heard of (possibly Joseph Mitchell). Alex would quote especially poignant Thin Lizzy lyrics (probably something from the second verse of “The Rocker”). I hope the blurbs are not too somber, though; I hope they stress that I had a great life and that I was already ready to die when I turned 27. No need to be maudlin about this. My death is no tragedy. I’ve climbed every mountain, really.

Twelve more strides and the hill is mine. This is the run of a lifetime. I’m a driver. I’m a winner. But things aren’t going to change, and I can’t feel it. I’m not a loser, baby, so no one is gonna kill me. I anticlimactically arrive at the top of my mountain, and then I head back down.

At the moment, nobody in New York knows that I’m dead. And this is because I am not.

 

Hotel showers are flawless. Within the realm of your hotel shower, you are an emperor. A tyrant! Everything is designed solely for you: one little bar of soap, one little bottle of shampoo, and a circular heating lamp stationed above your skull. I can hear the TV while I rinse off my North Carolina sweat; it’s a preseason football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. They’re playing the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, and nobody cares. Even Al Michaels is unabashedly stating that the game’s final outcome is meaningless. There’s something interesting about the way Americans completely disregard exhibition sporting events; when you really think about it, all sporting events are “exhibitions.” Nothing is truly at stake. There are never any profound consequences for the winners or the losers; if the Packers lose, we won’t execute Ahman Green or sell Brett Favre into slavery. At their core, the final outcome to every football game (including the Super Bowl) is wholly meaningless. So how did we all become convinced that a preseason game is somehow different than the 16 “legitimate” games Green Bay will start playing next month? Who decides what matters and what does not? How do we know the things that we know? There is no truth. There is no culture.

I am unsure why the water in this hotel shower is making me think like a Maoist.

Meanwhile, Mr. Favre throws a meaningless preseason incompletion while I joylessly dry myself and consider where I shall eat supper. Outside, the rain has started to fall. Perhaps I can find a restaurant that will let me sit by a window and stare at the lightning. That would be moving. I see no difference between romance and solitude.

It turns out I only need to drive 45 seconds to find the establishment I desire: There is a Cracker Barrel across the road. Cracker Barrel is sublime: You can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings. That’s advanced. I buy a newspaper and tell the hostess I want to sit by the window, but only families get to do that—you need at least five people to get window seats. Instead, my bo

My Cracker Barrel waitress is more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actually, that’s not true; my Cracker Barrel waitress is an ectomorphic 19-year-old woman with a semi-tragic haircut and slightly big teeth. However, by the time our four-minute conversation ends, I will be in love with her.

“What brings you through here?” she asks when she delivers the menu.

“I’m writing this story about dead people,” I say. “I’m driving around the country visiting the locations of famous rock-star deaths. Like, tomorrow I’m driving to where Duane Allman died.”

“Who?”

“Duane Allman. He was a rock star from the ’70s.”

She registers no response to this description. Maybe she blinked, but I doubt it. So I keep talking.

“He was in the Allman Brothers Band, which is kind of funny, because after he died, there ended up being only one Allman brother in the Allman Brothers Band. His brother is Gregg Allman. Gregg Allman was married to Cher for like a week in 1975.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she says. “But what will you do when you get to the place where he died?”

“I actually have no idea,” I admit. “I’ll just…I guess I’ll just walk around the general vicinity of where his motorcycle accident happened. Did I mention he died in a motorcycle crash? He died in a motorcycle crash. I don’t really have a plan, though. I guess I probably should.”

“That’s an interesting vacation,” she says.

“It’s a not a vacation,” I say. “I’m going to write about it for a magazine.”

“Well, what’s the point of your article, sugar?” And she really did refer to me as “sugar,” which is a totally discombobulating thing to hear from someone born in 1984.

“I don’t know if there is a point,” I say. “I mean, there will be a point, I assume, but I don’t have one yet. I’m hoping the story will just be this hazy, morbid trip across America. Kind of like a dream. I want to write something that feels like an unsentimental dream.”

“Like Kafka,” she says. And at the risk of sounding condescending and elitist, this blows my fucking mind.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, exactly. I mean, I could never write anything that good, of course, but…yes. Yes. Like Kafka! Exactly. Do you like Franz Kafka?”

“Can I ask you a question about dreaming?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, you can. You can absolutely ask me a question about dreaming. That would be tremendous. Yes, you can. What is your name?”

“Mary Beth,” she says. “So here is my question: Have you ever had a dream that seemed to last five years, even though you were only asleep for a few hours? Or did you ever have a dream that seemed to last 100 years? Or have you ever had a dream where you were married to someone for your entire life? Or a dream where you were lost in the arctic circle for decades and decades and decades?”

“Yes!” I say. “Yes I have. I completely understand where you are coming from.”

“Okay, cool. Now—obviously—dreams don’t last 100 years. Dreams last like 20 minutes. So that means we are somehow able to understand an accelerated passage of time while we dream. We can just naturally tell—somehow—whether the dream is happening in & happening in ‘dream time.’ And if it’s happening in dream time, what we experience in the span of 20 minutes can feel like a span of 20 years. You follow me?”

“Yes. Absolutely. You are absolutely right.”

“Okay, cool. But that’s not my question.” She adjusts her Lisa Loeb–like eyeglasses and places her hand on her hip. “My question is this: Are we only able to understand this because of books and movies and television? Because the difference between real time and dream time seems like something that would be impossible to understand organically.”

“Why do you possibly work here?” I ask.

“Take me seriously,” she says.

“I am taking you very seriously,” I say. “I am taking you more seriously than any woman I have ever met in a restaurant.”

“Ha,” she says, but she does not laugh. “What I’m wondering is if TV taught people how to have longer dreams. Because TV is always flashing forward: If sitcom characters are in the living room, and then a commercial for Tide comes on, and then those same people are suddenly lying in bed when the show returns, we all automatically understand that time has advanced. We just take for granted that the story has moved from daytime to nighttime. This is something we have all come to understand completely, and without even trying. Books do this all the time, too. Like, I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude right now, and—”

“What in the hell is going on here?”

“—and the unspoken encroachment of time is the crux of that entire book. You couldn’t write that book if people didn’t understand narrative time travel, because the story could never be told in real time. Nobody can read for 100 straight years. So what I’m wondering is how people dreamt before the invention of media. And not just before movies and TV but even before printed novels. I mean, how would a caveman dream? Would his dreams only happen in real time, like in Kiefer Sutherland’s 24? How could the subconscious mind of a caveman calibrate the idea of two things happening 10 years apart?”

“Well, there was always oral tradition,” I say, “and even the most rudimentary kind of storytelling demands that the listener imagine the passing of time. I suppose the larger question is how a caveman could tell the difference between his ‘actual life’ and his dream life, since I would have to assume they’d be identical; they’d probably both involve a lot of mastodon hunting. But regardless, I find your ideas fascinating. You are a fascinating Cracker Barrel waitress.”

“Thank you,” Mary Beth says. “I like to think about crazy shit sometimes.”

“So do I,” I say. “That’s all I like to think about, to be honest. But why did you tell this dream stuff to me? Do you talk to all your customers like this?”

“Oh, God no,” she says. “I thought maybe you were smart, because you were reading the newspaper.”

“But, but…but this is USA Today!”

“I know,” she says. “But you also looked bored

“I don’t think I can make it to California.”

I am speaking on my cell phone inside the RaceTrac, a colossal truck stop in Massoponax, Virginia; I am sitting in a red vinyl booth in front of a plate covered with lumpy white gravy and chicken-fried chicken. My striking blonde editor is on the line, and I can’t help but imagine how all the bearded truckers who currently surround me would be way impressed if they could see what she looks like. Of course, this fantasized envy would suggest that they could (somehow) see through a phone line and into another city, yet they would still (somehow) misinterpret the relationship I have with my editor. This is, of course, illogical; if they had the omnipotence to see two disjointed people simultaneously, one would assume they’d likewise possess the power to understand the context of what these two people were talking about. My imagination has problems with plot mechanics.

“Why can’t you go to California?” she asks. “I think you need to get there.”

“But it’s already been six days, and I’ve only made it to Virginia,” I say. “If I have to drive down to Joshua Tree after I get to Seattle and then back up to Los Angeles to get to LAX, that will take at least three more days. I don’t want to live like this.” My initial strategy was to end this road trip in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, the motel where Gram Parsons died in 1973 after replacing his blood with Jack Daniel’s, cocaine, barbiturates, morphine, and THC. I intended to replicate that evening, but that’s not going to happen. Still, Sia has hope.

“It would be great if you looked into Biggie’s death while you were in L.A., though,” she says. “And that would be just a few hours from Vegas, so you could also do Tupac.” Biggie Smalls (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.) was the New York rapper “assassinated” in 1997, just six months after Tupac Shakur had been “assassinated” after watching a 109-second Tyson fight at the MGM Grand. Those murders marked the height of the rap war between the East Coast and the West Coast, and conspiracy theorists continue to intertwine the two murders. Rock magazines will run retrospective stories about the impact of those two killings for the next five decades, partially because they’re culturally significant but primarily because most white rock critics feel extremely ashamed about not being black.

“Sia, I am calling you to shorten this trip. I am not calling you to make it longer. And who even knows where the fuck Biggie was killed? Those details have been lost to the sands of time. Nobody remembers that shit.”

“It was a drive-by shooting outside the Petersen Automotive Museum,” she says. “He was sitting in his car. It was at a party following the Soul Train Music Awards.” I had forgotten that Sia was one of the last reporters to interview Biggie before he died. I had also forgotten than Sia is approximately four times smarter than I am.

“Maybe so,” I respond. “This is your decision. If you really, really, really want me to go to Los Angeles, I’ll go to Los Angeles.”

“Don’t you want to cruise the Sunset Strip?”

“No.”

“Why not? Lots of excellent people died there.”

“I’m tired.”

“Are you drunk?”

“What?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Sia, it’s 1:20 in the afternoon.”

“Well, whatever, fine, I don is approached by 22-year-old BLANDLY HANDSOME WAITER with extremely thick triceps.]

Marc Bolan: Arguably the most pretentious wizard in glam-rock history, Bolan fronted T. Rex, claimed to author science fiction novels that were never published, and honestly believed it was a good idea to name an album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow: A Creamed Cage in August. With his signature top hat and solid-gold easy action, Bolan loved to sing about cars: He claims to have driven a Rolls-Royce, apparently because it was good for his voice. He loved his Cadi woman named Buick McKane, and he was a jeepster for her love. He even had “highway knees,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to signify. And this was all somewhat paradoxical, since Bolan never learned how to drive; the irony is further extended when one considers that he died in a 1977 car accident, two weeks before his 30th birthday (his girlfriend drove them both into a tree). Bolan glorified a machine he could not operate, only to have that same machine spell his doom. The lesson: Be careful what you wish for, lest you get it.

Steve Clark: As the insecure lead guitarist for Def Leppard, Clark liked to drink massive amounts of everything. In 1991, while taking prescription painkillers for three broken ribs, Clark came home from an evening at the pub and decided to have a few nightcaps, which—according to his drinking companion, Daniel Van Alphen—ended up being a triple vodka, a quadruple vodka, and a double brandy (all of which he consumed in 30 minutes). This killed him. What’s interesting about this episode is that Def Leppard had fired a guitarist named Pete Willis in 1982 because he had a drinking problem. The lesson: We all have problems, brother.

Nico: Born in Nazi Germany in 1938, Christa Päffgen’s father died in a concentration camp. She, however, managed to become a model. At the age of 15, a photographer dubbed the six-foot ectomorph “Nico,” supposedly to honor his ex-boyfriend. Nico would later move to New York, take a method-acting class with Marilyn Monroe, make a record for Brian Jones (which was produced by a young Jimmy Page), have a relationship with Bob Dylan, join Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and sing with the Velvet Underground, only to be kicked out of the band for being too charismatic. She feasted on heroin and cigarettes; she slept with (sadly) Jim Morrison and (oddly) Jackson Browne. When her son fell into a drug-induced coma, she showed up at the hospital to record the haunting beep of his life-support system. Then—at the age of 49, in Spain—she died in a bicycle accident. The lesson: Live weird, die weird.

Falco: Everybody in America thinks of Falco as a ridiculous one-hit joke rocker from Vienna who’s only remembered for a novelty single, 1986’s “Rock Me Amadeus.” Europeans, however, thought he was some kind of controversial genius (several of his songs were banned from international radio, including a track called “Jeanny,” which certain listeners interpreted as a glorification of rape and murder). In the ’90s, he fled the omnipresent Austrian media and lived like a sultan in the Dominican Republic, only to die there in 1998 when his Mitsubishi Pajero was hit by another car. The lesson: Europeans have terrible taste in everything.

Pete Ham and Tom Evans: There’s something especially poignant about people who hang themselves. Since hanging is understood as a form of capital punishment (and because capital punishment is inevitably a means to mollify the living), one always gets a sense that individuals who commit suicide by this method are literally executing themselves; they want to show society that they deserved to be punished. I am not sure how this applies to the band Badfinger, protégés of the Beatles whose best song (“Come and Get It”) was written by Paul McCartney. They signed with the Beatles’stardom; by the time they released Ass, in ’73, everything had collapsed. To make matters worse, they mysteriously lost $600,000 from an escrow account. In 1975, lead songwriter Ham hung himself. Three years later, what remained of Badfinger attempted to reunite, but that also failed; in the failure’s aftermath, bassist Evans hung himself, too. No other major band has experienced multiple hangings. Everyone likes to lionize Joy Division’s Ian Curtis for noosing it up in 1980, but that was his whole aesthetic; Joy Division’s singular directive was self-loathing. Every guy in that band should have hung himself, probably; nobody would have missed New Order, except for a bunch of idiots who think taking drugs and dancing is more fun than drinking and feeling melodramatic (which, I suppose, is everybody in the world except me). The lesson: Nobody can be the Beatles, so don’t even try.

Michael Hutchence: My sister liked INXS. I never understood who they were; I think they existed for 13 years before I knew their name was not pronounced “inks” (as in “rhymes with lynx”). Lead singer Hutchence hung himself like the dudes in Badfinger, but he was a little more straightforward about his intentions: The day before he killed himself in November 1997, he made a bunch of maniacal phone calls, including one to his manager. “I’ve fucking had enough,” he decreed. Hours later, he was found in a Sydney hotel room, kneeling on the floor—he had hung himself from the doorknob with a belt. There were many subsequent tabloid rumors that this was not a suicide and that Hutchence was actually involved in a diabolical autoerotic encounter that went haywire. There is no real evidence of this. There was, however, quite a party happening inside his blood (an internal cocktail composed of booze, coke, Prozac, and just about anything else you could imagine). The main thing I remember about his death was discussing it in the corner booth of Duffy’s Tavern in downtown Fargo; Lenore kept insisting that the color of the belt Hutchence hung himself with was brown. “Brown belts are the deadliest kind,” she insisted. The lesson: If INXS had covered “Hotel California,” that B-side would now seem strangely poignant.

Mike Patto and “Ollie” Halsall: As the two driving forces in Patto (a jazz-influenced psychedelic four-piece from the U.K.), nobody really cares that namesake vocalist Patto died from cancer in 1979 or that guitarist Halsall died from a heart attack in ’92 (possibly from a heroin overdose). However, consider this: During the 1980s, bassist Clive Griffiths and drummer John Halsey were involved in a car accident. Halsey recovered from his injuries and now walks with a limp; Griffiths, meanwhile, was partially paralyzed and contracted a rare case of partial amnesia. What’s so compelling about this amnesia is that Griffiths no longer remembers being involved with Patto. He can’t remember being in a band whose singer died in the late ’70s—which means he can’t remember the singer, either. He has not forgotten how to rock; he has forgotten that he did rock. The lesson: To live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.

Randy Rhoads: “March 19, 1982, is a day that will live with me forever. Not only did I lose my best friend but the greatest musician I had ever known.” Ozzy Osbourne wrote these words in the liner notes of the posthumous live album Tribute. “Randy Rhoads came into my life in 19le. It’s a sequenced collection of individualized deaths. My relationship with Dee Dee ended like a gangland execution: She called me on the telephone and I shot her in the back of the skull. My relationship with Diane is ending like a massive stroke; things were bad immediately, but there’s still the slim hope of a total recovery. The death of Lenore has been akin to that of a person in hospice; it’s been an agonizing case of bone cancer, but the trauma has pulled us closer. Lenore is like a grandparent I never truly knew until she became terminal. And as for Quincy…well, I’m not totally sure how she died out of my life, to be honest. Quincy is like a passenger on a plane that crashed into the North Atlantic, never to be recovered. She must be dead. Logic demands that she is dead. But until I see a body, the potential for denial remains. Without a proper funeral, I cannot accept her passing. I mean, have we sent a search party to Greenland? Maybe she’s living among the musk ox. Maybe she has amnesia. Maybe she’s a vampire. These things happen.

I’m too drunk to continue writing. Lizzie the Cat is staring at me; I think she’s judging me. “Meow,” I say. “Meow meow meow! You know that I am right.” When I crawl under the covers, Lizzie bounds off the bed and lies down in the corner of the room, hissing in my general direction. I guess I’m not sleeping with Lizzie after all.

THE NINTH DAY

Bell Bottom Blues    Something That Could Not Happen Yet Did    The River, the Road, the South    Pole Vault Summer    Satan Lives

Eric Clapton has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on three separate occasions. He’s been inducted as a solo artist, as the frontman for Cream, and as original guitarist for the Yardbirds. He’s been inducted on four separate occasions if you count the 2004 inclusion of Traffic, a group he was not a member of and has no significant connection with beyond the fact that they suck in the same generalized manner.

With the possible exception of Jim Morrison, Eric Clapton is (arguably) the most overrated rock musician of all time; he’s a talented, boring guitar player, and he’s a workmanlike, boring vocalist. He also has an abhorrent (and, I suppose, boring) neck beard. However, he is not terrible in totality; he did unleash one stellar album: Derek and the Dominos’ 1970 LP, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Part of what made Derek and the Dominos intriguing was their almost unfathomable self-destructiveness: With the exception of Clapton, virtually every guy in the band either died or went to prison (including Duane Allman, a detail I completely overlooked while in Macon three days ago). Jim Gordon, the Domino drummer who wrote the astonishing piano coda to “Layla” (best employed in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas) spent his life battling schizophrenic compulsions,¹ ultimately listening to the voices inside his head and murdering his own mother. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison. That shit makes lusting after George Harrison’s wife seem almost affable.

Still, the idea of C Clapton’s soul does seem—for lack of a better term—“tortured.” I hate to use a term like torture when discussing someone’s romantic crush, because it always seems flippant; I’d sooner feel unrequited love for 100 women than spend two hours tasting electricity in the Hanoi Hilton (being in love is not like having your testicles attached to a car battery, even if that’s how it sometimes seems). However, I understand what Eric was feeling, sort of. I have to assume part of his heart was simply shocked by the irony of this specific attraction: As one of the best-looking, best-known musicians in the world, Eric Clapton could have immediately had any woman he wanted—but he still wasn’t a Beatle. In 1970, George Harrison was probably one of only 10 people in the universe who was cooler than Eric Clapton, and Harrison happened to be Clapton’s best friend. Those are awfully depressing circumstances for a man in love.

“You see, that kind of thinking is precisely your problem, Chuck.” This is what Quincy would say if she were in the passenger seat right now, talking about Eric Clapton. If Q were in this car with me, I would still be playing Derek and the Dominos, and I would be casually saying all the thoughts I just wrote to myself, and Quincy would be outraged. “You always dwell on the wrong elements of relationships, Chuck. The reason ‘Layla’ is moving has nothing to do with the fact that Eric Clapton should—or shouldn’t—be able to sleep with Pattie Boyd because he’s almost as cool as George Harrison. Having an attractive girlfriend is not supposed to be the reward for being cool.”

“I know, I know,” I would say in response. “But still, it must have been hard to think, ‘Man, I could have any woman I want—except for the one woman I really want.’ Remember how it was before you and I finally got together? I spent a year killing myself trying to make you love me, and it was a heartbreaking process. It was like I was singing ‘Layla’ to you every single night, and all you did was sleep with George Harrison.”

“But that’s exactly the shit I’m referring to,” Q would say. “The year you spent ‘killing yourself’ to make me love you…I thought that was us being best friends. We had all those intimate conversations and you sent me all those long e-mails and we watched all those movies involving Eric Stoltz—I thought that was us having fun. But you see that kind of behavior as the work you’re forced to do in order to sleep with the people you want to sleep with.”

“That’s not true,” I would say. “I would do anything to go back to that year when we weren’t having sex.”

“You say that now, but you’d do the same thing if we went back to 1996.”

“I kind of have to agree with Quincy on this point.” This is what Lenore would say if she were suddenly in the backseat, listening to Q and me argue about Eric Clapton. “Chuck, you do tend to repeat the same behavior over and over again, and all you really change is the person involved. I remember one night when you kissed me, and you spontaneously said my lips tasted like ‘the perfect combination of cigarettes, lip gloss, and Lenore.’ That was a really wonderful, really romantic thing to hear from somebody, and I thought about that sentence for a really long time. But then you kissed me two years later, and you ‘spontaneously’ said that almost as troubling that you’re using such a clumsy literary device to make your internal monologue seem like dialogue, and I hate the way you’re making us all talk with identical syntax. Inside your own mind, we all talk exactly like you!”

“Ah, Christ,” I would say, suddenly trapped in a no-win situation within my own superego. “Diane, I talk to you because I love talking to you.”

“Yes, but why did you start talking to me? And if I gained 40 pounds and cut my hair, how long would it be before you stopped talking to me?”

“That is a completely unfair question,” I would say, which is interesting, because—technically—I’m unfairly asking it of myself. “I have no idea what would happen if you suddenly looked different. What would happen if I stopped being funny? What if I became retarded? What if I decided to stop listening to you whenever you talk about why you like shopping for boots? How long would it be before you stopped talking to me?”

“That, in a nutshell, is why you don’t understand what ‘Layla’ is about,” Quincy would interject. “Diane brought up qualities that make someone physically unattractive. You are bringing up qualities that make someone unlikable. And you don’t seem to see any difference between those two ideas.”

Quincy is making a valid point, if I do say so myself.

“You know, this is probably why you’re visiting all these places where people died, yet all you’re thinking about are the women you’ve slept with,” Q might continue. “You don’t understand love or death, so you compensate by becoming inappropriately obsessed with both—and probably for the same exact reason. You’re conflating unlike idioms in the hope that they will accidentally take on symbolic meaning. It’s like this thing with the drummer from Derek and the Dominos going fucknuts and killing his mother: For some fucked-up reason, knowing that factoid is making you appreciate ‘Layla’ even more, as if a piano coda written by a sociopath is inherently more interesting than a piano coda written by Elton John or Michael McDonald or anybody who’s not clinically insane. Can’t you see that someone losing his mind and killing his mom is not interesting? It’s tragic.”

The voices inside my head never make me want to kill my mother. However, they sometimes make me want to kill myself.

 

So here is the big question: Is dying good for your career? Cynics always assume that it is, but I’m not so sure anymore. And now that I’ve been to Memphis, I’m not even sure if I care.

Memphis offers two key points of investigation for rock ’n’ roll forensic experts. The first is Graceland, where Elvis Presley’s heart stopped on a toilet. The second is Mud Island Harbor on the Mississippi River, where Jeff Buckley went for a swim and did not succeed. One could argue that both of these artists significantly benefited from dying: Presley’s career was collapsing when he died in 1977, so dying ended that slide and—in all likelihood—kept his legacy from becoming a sad joke (it is virtually impossible to imagine a “noble” 70-year-old Elvis, had Presley somehow managed to live into the present). Meanwhile, Buckley’s death is precisely what made him into a star; he was a well-regarded—but relatively unfamous—avant-garde rock musician until he drowned on May 29, 1997. Almost immediately, he became a messianic figure (and his album Grace instantly evolved” We would play Skid Row on maximum volume at 2:00 A.M., and nobody complained. This was the kind of housing development where nobody complained about anything, ever. Van Guy would actually ask us to turn our stereo up if we happened to be playing “Monkey Business.” One night, a drunk girl broke into our apartment while I was sleeping on the couch, but it turned out she was simply confused (she thought she was breaking into her ex-boyfriend’s apartment). I fell in love with one of our neighbors; her name was Heather, and she would rush over to our apartment every time MTV showed the Alice in Chains video for “Man in the Box,” coquettishly claiming that the video’s imagery terrified her. We went to see Point Break together, but nothing happened. That, obviously, was a weird summer. The summer of 1993 was almost as weird; I was living with two very short men who liked to smoke cigars and wrestle on the carpet, and (somehow) we had a swimming pool. Every afternoon, a perfect-looking woman would come over to our pool and try to teach me how to swim, but I never learned; all we ever did was drink Coors in the sun and get heatstroke. Nothing ever happened between us; neither of us even tried. I’d watch two syndicated hours of Saved by the Bell at suppertime (two episodes on USA and two episodes on TBS) before driving over to a house on a street called Dyke Avenue (really!) and drinking Boone’s Farm wine with seven alcoholic slackers who were somehow even lazier than me. Radiohead’s “Creep” was on MTV constantly, and we universally agreed that Jonny Greenwood’s guitar tones sounded like a lawnmower. We used to argue about the U.S. Constitution, although I can’t recall if we actually cared. Every person in that Dyke Ave house was depressed about nothing in particular. And it was weird. And it’s weird how it all seemed normal at the time, and that it never occurred to me that this was not how normal people lived, and that there would eventually be a day in my future when I would look back on that summer and realize I spent the most compelling period of my life sleepwalking through reality. Because—right now, in the present tense—I know I’m experiencing the third-weirdest summer of my life. I’m wholly aware of that fact. I am wholly aware that hopelessly tromping through road ditches in rural Mississippi in the hope of understanding the satanic majesty of Robert Johnson will be hard to explain to someone when I’m 50. The context will be unthinkable. In the distant future, this afternoon will probably seem weirder than living with a pole-vaulter in 1991.

Or maybe they’ll just seem the same.

 

Somehow, I always assumed the Deep South would be similar to the not-so-deep Midwest. I’m not sure why I have always assumed this; perhaps it’s because—whenever I meet displaced Southerners in New York City—they remind me of what I miss about the United States (a nation that Manhattan is not part of). But it turns out Mississippi is not like North Dakota. It’s not even like Ohio. People here are inflexibly obsessed with “being Southern,” and that self-adoration manifests itself in completely unpredictable ways. For example: As I drive away from Satan’s Crossroads, the man on 94.1 FM “the Buzz” tells me it’s almost five o’clock, and then he says, “And you know what that means!” And I do know what that means; it me the song they always played at 5:00 P.M. on Fridays was Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” In Fargo, it was Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend.” These both seemed like obvious choices (especially the latter). However, “the Buzz” plays “Camel Walk” by Southern Culture on the Skids, a commercially insignificant band that looks like a cross between the B-52’s, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the kind of U.S. citizens usually described as “the unemployable.” When performing live, Southern Culture on the Skids periodically throws pieces of fried chicken into the audience. “Camel Walk” is a song about the erotic qualities of oatmeal-pie consumption. Somehow, this is the song that represents philosophical freedom in Mississippi; this is the universal metaphor for escaping the workaday clutches of The Man. But it is their song, you know? Cleveland co-opted Springsteen from Jersey, abashedly pretending that he’s actually a part of Ohio culture; Fargo picked Canada’s Loverboy simply because they sang the most expository lyrics. But the South doesn’t want to co-op anything. They like who they are.

THE TENTH DAY

Onward to Iowa    A Coincidence of Consequence    The Life I Forgot I Had

There is a certain emotion we all have the potential to experience, and it is an emotion that can only be described as “terrifying nostalgia.” I briefly felt it yesterday afternoon, but it smothered me in totality at 11:30 last night. I was watching a movie on the Sundance Channel called Security, Colorado, which is a city I’ve never been to and which probably does not exist. It was a cheap, rudimentary film (slow-moving, shot on video, mostly improvised) that was clearly made by people in their very early twenties. The plot involved a 21-year-old woman from Denver who relocated to Security, Colorado, to be with her new boyfriend and quickly became depressed by her alien surroundings. The pacing of this movie was shockingly deliberate: In one scene, the woman just sat at a desk and wordlessly updated her résumé; later, we watched her drive to the post office and mail the résumé to prospective employers. Within the reality of Security, Colorado, this sequence constitutes “action.” And I’m not sure if this was supposed to be entertaining or insightful, but it was certainly arresting. I could have watched that scene five times in a row.

Now, here’s what’s so terrifying about Security, Colorado: The stark, pedestrian images used by the filmmakers (probably out of financial necessity) expressed nothing, symbolically or metaphorically. The only purpose they served was to remind me that a huge chunk of my life is completely over, even though I will probably live 60 more years. There are so many things that will never happen to me again, and I never even noticed when those things stopped occurring. And this does not mean I wish I had my old life back, because I like my new life better; I was just shocked to discover how much of what used to be central to my

“Perhaps I do! What is that, exactly?”

“It’s a psychotic condition associated with nihilistic delusions. People who are still alive become convinced that they’re actually dead.”

“That doesn’t sound anything like what I just described to you, Chuck. Where are you?”

“Iowa. I just saw Great White, and they were not bad.”

“How much have you had to drink tonight?”

“Not much. But some.”

“Are you calling about Diane?”

“Why would I be calling about Diane?”

“I don’t know. You tell me, Chuck. You’re the one who called.”

“But I never said I was calling about Diane. I never even implied that I was.”

“That’s true.”

“Diane doesn’t love me because I love her. That’s all it is, isn’t it? The fact that I love her makes me completely unappealing.”

“I don’t know, Chuck. But…yes. That is most likely accurate.”

“Why is she like that?”

“I don’t know. Why is everybody like that? Why are you like that?”

“You know, I suddenly don’t want to talk about this. And now I’m faced with the additional concern of your eyes rolling back inside your skull. I don’t even know how to address this issue. Do you think maybe you’re losing your goddamn mind?”

“That’s certainly what my mom thinks.”

“You better get to sleep, Lucy. You’ll be exhausted tomorrow. Sorry I called so late. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“No worries. I was just lying here, pretending to be hooked up to an IV needle.”

“Lucy, I absolutely cannot fathom why you would be pretending that.”

“That’s what I do when I can’t fall asleep. I pretend I’m in a hospital, hooked up to an IV—except that I imagine the IV is actually draining the life out of me, drip by drip.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess you told me that once before. Well, good night. Have fun pretending to die, Lucy Chance.”

“You too, Chuck Klosterman.”

THE ELEVENTH DAY

Planes That Land Quickly and Accidentally    The Truth About Lying    I’m Worried, I’m Always in Love

The sky blinds me through my still-cracked windshield this morning as I listen to my favorite album of the 1970s: Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. Rumours was the best-selling studio album of that decade and remains the sixth most successful record of all time, and I always love it when my own personal taste perfectly dovetails with that of mainstream-rock consumers from a bygone era; it’s like finding common ground with the bones in a graveyard. Maybe I’ll follow up Rumours with the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Shania Twain’s Come on Over, and the 1976 debut record from Bostonng on Rumours is about breaking up with people, as it was written and recorded while (a) guitarist-songwriter Lindsey Buckingham ended a lengthy romance with shawl-clad singer Stevie Nicks, (b) bassist John McVie divorced singer-keyboardist Christine McVie, and (c) drummer Mick Fleetwood began mentally preparing himself to nail Stevie, which finally happened during (I think) the making of 1979’s Tusk. Rumours became a very metaphoric album for Quincy and me. We wasted a lot of time debating the song “Go Your Own Way,” specifically over who had the moral high ground in the lyrical argument between Buckingham and Nicks. Predictably, Q always took Stevie Nicks’s side in this debate, and I always aligned myself with control freak Lindsey. “The fact that Lindsey Buckingham even wrote a song like this proves he’s a jackass,” Q would say. “What kind of asshole forces his ex-girlfriend to sing backing vocals on a song that accuses her of being a slut?” In retrospect, this does seem egocentrically vindictive. Still, I think Stevie Nicks totally had it coming, especially in light of the fact that she later shacked up with Don Henley.

Rumours is supposedly Bill Clinton’s favorite album, and that makes complete sense (Hillary is his gold dust woman, I guess, and I’m sure she would verify that rulers make bad lovers). The songs on Rumours make me think about myriad things, particularly about how complicated it will be to reconcile my relationship with Diane if I see Lenore in two days and suddenly decide that I want to drop everything and spend the rest of my life with her. This is probably not going to happen, but it’s also not impossible; the thing about Lenore is that I cannot say no to her. Whenever we’re apart, it’s remarkably easy for me to detach myself from her life. However, if we’re in the same room—and if I have to look into her doe eyes and if I’m close enough to smell her neck—I am as weak as Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross. The same thing happens when I talk to Diane on the telephone: Somehow, her language always obliterates my logic. Like Ron Artest in the open floor, Diane can always break me down. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Diane called me while I was looking directly at Lenore; I have no idea who is the unstoppable force and who is the immovable object. I have no control over the things that thrill me.

But you know what? Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture, and Rumours sometimes reminds me of this. I once interviewed Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, arguably the least pretentious semi-genius of the modern rock age. We started talking about how the best parts of songs are usually accidents; Tweedy mentioned that the most transcendent moments in pop music are inevitably unintentional, because listeners reinvent those mistakes and give them a personal meaning no artist could ever create on purpose. This segued into a conversation about Fleetwood Mac, and I told him about the way Quincy and I would incessantly play the opening five seconds of “I Don’t Want to Know” at maximum volume. This is because—if you play the song loudly enough—you can hear Lindsey Buckingham’s fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. His sliding phalanges make this unspeakably cool squeak; it sounds organic and raw and impossible to fake. Q and I would play this opening sequence over and over and over again, and we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the inside of a song. And when I told that story to Tweedy, I was surprised how inexplicably happy it made him.

“It’s so great to hear you say that,” T personally, but—from what I know about him—I would assume he’s the kind of artist who wants to control every single element of how his music is perceived. Yet the one moment off Rumours that was most important to you and your friend is a little crack he couldn’t spackle over. Nobody can control anything, really.”

This is true. In fact, the day after Tweedy told me this, he checked himself into a rehabilitation clinic for an addiction to painkillers. I never saw it coming. We had talked in his backyard for three hours, and nothing seemed wrong; Tweedy seemed totally reasonable and devoid of delusion. He seemed completely in command of his life. Now, maybe he was pretending. But maybe we’re all pretending. And maybe that’s why I’ve convinced myself that I love “I Don’t Want to Know” for its five seconds of squeak. Nobody can control anything, really.

 

Clear Lake, Iowa, is a town with a wonderfully expository name: it’s a little community next to a lake, and the water in that sumbitch is way clear. Almost 25 years ago, a small plane crashed in a frozen soybean field 4.7 miles north of this town, and its cabin held the Big Bopper (best known for “Chantilly Lace”), Ritchie Valens (best known for Lou Diamond Phillips’s winning portrayal in La Bamba) and Buddy Holly (best known as the precursor to Rivers Cuomo, at least according to 15-year-old emo girls currently living in Omaha). Don McLean felt this crash was the day the music died, inadvertently prompting many drunk U.S. males to symbolically drive Chevys to levies. Thirty-two years later (and despite Madonna’s effort to prove otherwise), “American Pie” remains a stunning musical achievement. There are only two really long songs that get played on classic-rock radio every single day: “American Pie” (whose album version clocks in at 8 minutes and 38 seconds) and “Stairway to Heaven” (recently remastered to 8 minutes exactly). I’ve noticed that nobody changes the station when “American Pie” comes on; they always listen to the whole thing and sing along with the chorus. However, almost no one listens to “Stairway to Heaven” all the way through. We need some sociology grad students to look into this.

But ANYWAY, it takes maybe 15 minutes to drive out to the gravel road near the crash location (nice little maps are provided at the Clear Lake visitors’ bureau), and then it’s a half-mile walk through a bean field. As I walk along the fence line toward the unknown marker, I find myself considering the relationship between plane crashes and rock ’n’ roll. If you’re a dead rock star and you weren’t a heroin addict, odds are you died in a plane. As you (hopefully) noticed on page 97, I visited the Skynyrd disaster just four days before this one. As stated on page 109, heterosexual guitarist Randy Rhoads died in a plane crash in Florida. Otis Redding’s plane went down in Madison, Wisconsin. Rick Nelson’s DC-3 crashed on the way to Dallas in 1985, and everybody on board was burned alive when the cabin caught on fire (except for the pilot and the copilot, which is something that never seems to happen). Stevie Ray Vaughan didn’t die in a plane crash, but a helicopter is close enough; I suppose Patsy Cline wasn’t a “rock star,” but her 1963 death near Camden, Tennessee, falls into this same idiom.

For unadulterated freak-out potential, nothing usurps death by plane crash. In a car accident, there’s never more than an instant of recognition—if you have any more time than that, you can usually consider what album you’re pulling off the rack, and you find yourself pouring $70 of cocaine onto Men at Work’s Business as Usual, you have a drug problem. Get help.

THE TWELFTH DAY

“Slow Ride” v. “Free Ride”

Musical structures define the process of motion. There are particular words and melodies that lend themselves to transportation; often, pop songs of this nature only sound good to humans who are actively operating motorized vehicles. There are myriad examples of this: Judas Priest’s “Better by You, Better than Me,” the Scorpions’ “Lovedrive,” Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” and anything ever recorded by REO Speedwagon. However, the two clearest examples of this phenomenon are Foghat’s 1976 song “Slow Ride” and Edgar Winter’s 1973 hit “Free Ride.” These songs are so philosophically intertwined that they’re often conflated by certain subsets of Americans, namely (a) gargantuan men with mustaches who put money into jukeboxes when they drink Coors, and (b) unemployed film historians who are never quite sure which of these songs appears on the soundtrack to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused¹ and which one was used in the film but wasn’t included on the official soundtrack release.² However, those who make this mistake are not merely juxtaposing a smoked-out heavy rocker with a mid-tempo boogie rocker; those who make this mistake are misguided patriots and shortsighted moral relativists. The sonic differences between “Slow Ride” and “Free Ride” pale in comparison to their idealistic dissonance: While “Slow Ride” advocates a worldview that accepts and understands life as it is, “Free Ride” demands its listener to actively change the world and take a proactive, self-reliant approach to everyday existence. “Slow Ride” is a more visceral song, but “Free Ride” outlines a more optimistic way to live. This is probably because Edgar Winter—almost without question—is the most successful albino “keytar” enthusiast of the late 20th century. He had a lot to be happy about.

“Slow Ride” opens with a repetitive bass drum that (momentarily) creates an atmosphere of utter doom; it is as if we are all enslaved in the belly of a pirate ship and Foghat drummer Roger Earl is going to force us to methodically row until we reach the end of a pre-Copernican earth. However, this is ultimately not the case. In truth, we are about to take a “slow ride,” and we are implored to “take it easy.” But what does Foghat mean when they say slow? What truly constitutes easy? Though Foghat was from England, their perspective mirrored the constructs of many Eastern principles are based on the idea that every moment is an existence upon itself and there is no action devoid of merit; eating a bowl of rice can be as satisfying and self-actualizing as completing a triathlon. “Lonesome” Dave Peverett takes the same stance, although it’s possible he’s actually talking about having sex with strippers from Brixton.

Conversely, “Free Ride” paints the portrait of a society of extremes: Mountains are described as “high,” valleys are classified as “low,” and no one seems to know how to grapple with this paradox. Here, Winter takes a classically American posture: The answer, he tells us, comes “from within.” His conception of a “free ride”—in other words, his conception of freedom—is founded on individuality and personal responsibility. A slow rider appreciates the world, but he’s also shackled to a static reality; meanwhile, a free rider is a wholly creative force. Edgar Winter personifies the cowboy spirit: He is not trying to find comfort within the present; he is reengineering a living future.

That said, “Slow Ride” is better live.

 

There are a lot of disenfranchised cool kids in downtown Minneapolis, and a lot of them seem to have a general idea of where Replacements guitarist Bob Stinson drank himself to death in December 1995. They all know it was on the 800 block of West Lake Street, and they all seem to think it was next to a bowling alley called Bryant-Lake Bowl. The kids are all right: Stinson died in a dilapidated upstairs apartment situated above a smalltime leather shop that’s directly across from the Bryant-Lake lanes. “I remember that night,” says BLB cook Holly Morris, a bowling-alley employee of nine years. “Everybody was looking out the window at the ambulances. But I didn’t even know who he was at the time. He wasn’t that famous.”

Morris claims I am probably the first person who ever came looking for the location of Stinson’s demise (or at least the only one she can remember). As such, I am unsure which of the two upstairs apartments actually housed Minneapolis’s finest alcoholic guitar hero. I walk around to the back of the building and scamper up the wooden steps that lead to the two flats (it occurs to me that these would be hard stairs for a drunk to handle, especially in wintertime). The door on the right has a sign that says BEWARE OF DOG and no sign of activity inside; the door on the left is unmarked, but when I peer through the screen door, I can see a child’s drawing of Jesus on the refrigerator.

I knock on the door to the left. No answer. I knock again. Again, no answer. This is strange, because I know (for certain) that somebody is in this apartment: As I circled around to the stairs, I saw a pudgy white arm ashing a cigarette out of the window. Granted, I don’t really have a plan here—I’m not exactly sure what I should ask this person if and when he opens the door (“Um…do you ever play ‘Bastards of Young’ and stare at your stereo speakers?”). But I feel like I should at least see the inside of this apartment (or something), so I keep knocking. And knocking. I knock for 10 minutes. No one ever comes out. I try to peep into the same window where I witnessed “the cigarette incident,” but now the shade is down and I’m starting to feel like a stalker. I ultimately decide to walk away, having learned zero about a deno answer when I called yesterday, either. What the fuck is going on? For the second time today, I don’t leave a message. Maybe she’s just out of sorts. Besides, it’s not like this is particularly strange behavior; Q is not exactly punctual. The first time Quincy ever came over to my apartment, she was 15 minutes late. “That’s one thing you’ll have to accept about me,” she said as she removed her scarf and threw it on my futon. “Everywhere I go, I’m always 15 minutes early or 15 minutes late.” This turned out to be a half-truth. For the next two years, she was 15 minutes late for almost everything we ever did together. She was never 15 minutes early for anything; once, she arrived exactly on time and mysteriously elected to count that as being 10 minutes early, which still confuses me. Our nation’s relationship with time is something I will never understand. “You are a foolish man,” Quincy would often tell me. “You show up too early for everything. Don’t you understand that when people say a party is starting at 9:00, they actually mean the guests are supposed to come at 10:00? That’s just common sense.” I will never buy that logic. In America, parties that are supposed to start at 9:00 P.M. actually start at 10:00 P.M. However, rock concerts that are supposed to start at 9:00 P.M. actually start at 9:45. Movies that are scheduled for 9:00 P.M. don’t begin until 9:09. Sporting events set for 9:00 P.M. begin at 9:05. However, television shows that are set for 9:00 P.M. do start at 9:00 P.M., unless they’re being broadcast on TBS. So what’s crazier: That I show up for things when they’re supposed to begin, or that everyone else in the entire world has somehow come to accept that every activity operates within its own unspoken, individual schedule? How is everyone else’s wrongness understood to be right?

If Quincy is avoiding me on purpose, I will spend a lot of time staring at my hands.

 

The day is warm, but the day is disappearing. I’ve just arrived at the apartment of My Nemesis. I am sitting beneath a mammoth poster of the film Blow Up, and My Nemesis is sitting in front of a computer that looks like two computers. We’re drinking beer and talking about mutual friends we’ve completely lost contact with. Something is going to happen tonight.

I met My Nemesis in November 1990. I walked into somebody’s dorm room to play Nintendo, and he was sitting on the bed, holding an acoustic guitar on which he could play only one note—the opening note of Tesla’s “Love Song.” He was wearing a denim jacket, and he had used a black Magic Marker to draw the symbol for anarchy on the back. It was just about the silliest thing I had ever seen. We immediately became friends. One night, we were driving down Demers Avenue in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and I was sitting in the passenger seat of his Buick Somerset. I made a joke about the likelihood of My Nemesis having anal sex with his high school girlfriend, which was a reference I made 30 or 40 times a day. He pulled over the car and hit me in the face. Soon after, we decided to live together. Every interaction we had was based on arguing, drinking, or both. Usually both. For the first two years we knew each other, it was the most creative friendship I had ever experienced. Over the next two years, it became the ated. She (literally) sees a window of opportunity and climbs out onto the roof.

Something is going to happen tonight.

My Nemesis has a palatial apartment; the building was once owned by the heir to the Pillsbury dough fortune. If you crawl out a certain window, you land on the roof of a smaller apartment building that’s directly next to it. From there, you can jump back onto My Nemesis’s building and ascend to the summit of its roof. But this maneuver is not safe; I suppose it’s never safe to climb on any roof, but this roof is very steep and very, very high. So is Uma. She’s also been drinking heavily for four hours, and she’s wearing heels.

At this point, it becomes abundantly obvious that My Nemesis is pursuing Uma Thurman, because he (literally) pursues her onto this roof. My Nemesis has always been an agile billy goat. This turn of events makes Non-Drinking Guy extremely angry, as he is certain Uma Thurman is going to fall to her death. It is times like these when being Non-Drinking Guy must profoundly suck. Meanwhile, me and Drinking Guy are trying to ascertain the relative danger of the situation, but we’re too stoned; we can’t tell if this behavior is incredibly grave or incredibly normal. This is the single-biggest problem with taking drugs: What’s normal seems crazy, and what’s crazy seems normal.

“Do you think we should call the police?” asks Drinking Guy.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I say, “unless you think we should. Because if we should, we should do so immediately.”

“I don’t think we should call the police,” Drinking Guy replies. “Although it is going to be pretty bad if she falls off, as she will likely be killed on impact.”

“Maybe she does this all the time,” I say. “She seems pretty good at climbing.”

“She’s always been good at climbing.”

“Oh, excellent,” I say. “So this is normal. You’ve obviously seen her climb things before.”

“Yeah, but I think it might have been a staircase.”

Non-Drinking Guy is now officially “enraged with concern.” He starts yelling at Uma Thurman, demanding that she come down posthaste, insisting that he is going to leave the scene if she does not, because he is not in the mood to watch her die. Uma is straddling the peak of the roof. Damn, she looks so fuckable up there, kicking her head back in laughter, drunkenly risking death for no apparent reason. It’s like watching Grace Kelly climb Raymond Burr’s fire escape in Rear Window. Non-Drinking Guy is so pissed that he’s actually balling up his fists in anger. “She is going to kill herself,” he pleads to me and Drinking Guy. “Don’t you guys care that she will die if she falls off? She will not get hurt. She will be fucking dead.”

I start to imagine what it would be like if Uma Thurman fell to earth. Would she plummet in the blink of an eye, or would it feel like slow motion? Would watching her death haunt me forever? Would I still leave Minneapolis tomorrow morning, no differently than if we had never met? Would I have to include this episode in my narrative, since I’m already doing a story about death? Would this night become the most interesting anecdote of my entire life? Would I spend the next 40 years recounting the night I met a foxy rock chick, smoked a few of her cigarettes, spent four hours trying to kiss her, and then watched her plummet 60 feet to the pavement? Would the final image of her smashed, blo I remember about this person?

But then Uma climbs down.

Uma climbs down from the roof, and so does My Nemesis, and then everybody goes into the living room for two more beers. Non-Drinking Guy immediately returns to his traditionally unenraged self. We start asking each other hypothetical questions, and suddenly it’s 4:30 A.M. Uma Thurman hugs me good-bye, and we agree to become Friendsters. People don’t die. People go home, and people go to bed, and Quincy never leaves me a voice mail.

Nothing is going to happen tonight.

THE THIRTEENTH DAY

Lenore    The Situation With The Eyeglasses    The Worst Decision I Ever Made on Purpose    Ryan Adams, Somehow

I’m still half wasted when I awake, which is better than being hung over (but just barely). It’s 9:05 A.M. I roll over and see a little book on the floor; it’s Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It occurs to me that—since leaving for this trip—I have read nothing except the occasional newspaper (and usually just the sports section). Surprisingly, I don’t miss it. I’ve always been envious of friends who claim to have some kind of profound, erotized relationship with literature, because I don’t feel that way at all. My apartment is filled with books, but I secretly suspect I hate reading; sometimes it feels like something I’m forever forcing myself to do (and for reasons I never quite understand). Part of this might have to do with the fact that I write at roughly the same speed I read, so I always feel like I should be making better use of my time. Nobody’s paying me to read, you know? And I realize voicing this perspective in print is precisely why certain intellectuals consider me irrelevant, and I realize that the proliferation of this style of thinking is probably what makes America a nation of imbeciles, and I realize this sentiment would break the heart of my eighth-grade English teacher. But it’s also 85 percent true. And I’m not sure how this happened, because when I was in high school, all I ever did was read; it wasn’t until I spent thousands of dollars to pursue higher education that I discovered reading was kind of a neutral, reactive way to spend an evening. At this point, I almost have to force myself to read, which is what I do now; I pick up Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and read the first 20 pages. It’s not bad. Maybe those 20 pages made me smarter, and maybe they did not. Actually, I just find myself wishing I could eat opium for breakfast, so I’m guessing they did not.

I take a boozy shower in a less-than-sparkling bathroom; it appears My Nemesis still owns the same towels he had in college, although that’s probably impossible. Today my drive will be relatively short: I’m going up to see Lenore, who now operates an import store in a little town called Herschel, three hours north of downtown Minneapolis. She opened this store after traveling around the Eastern Hemisphere for nine months, eventually concluding that the people of rural Minnesota needed more o person with this unknown scar?” I’ve asked her about that scar 200 times, and I still can’t remember how it happened. And I remember everything.

It’s full-on night when we exit the restaurant; we’re holding hands, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of organic hand-holding that makes people secure. We drive back to her cabin and sit on the back porch, staring into the endless black water and listening to the miniature waves lapping up against the rocks. The moon has menacing clouds slowly drifting in front of its orange face; it’s like the opening shot from a 1950s werewolf movie. Everything is inappropriately romantic.

“I suppose we need to talk about some things,” I say. And the way I say this gives away everything, because Lenore immediately says she knows that we aren’t going to be together and that the weekend at the wedding was probably just an unconscious way for us to finally say good-bye to each other. She doesn’t say this with much conviction, but I agree with her. This is a complex situation. Part of the intricacy comes from the fact that—at the wedding, which was in June—I gave her an early copy of an essay collection called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. This was a book I had written that was due for release in early August (i.e., this same week). The opening essay in that book was written the week immediately following her going-away party in Minneapolis (i.e., Chuck’s 9/11), so it’s all about her. A few months prior, I had also written a piece about Lenore that ran in GQ, because that’s the kind of thing self-indulgent, first-person writers inevitably do. I have no idea what compels me to do these things; I will never understand why I need to write about the events that other people merely experience. And even though Lenore understands that this is how I am, she remains uncomfortable about having thousands of people read about my personal feelings toward her, particularly when the things I write are often things I would never say.

“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” she asks by the lake. “It’s on the second page of your book, but you never actually said it to me. Not even once.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “I told you I loved you seven times.” This is technically accurate but intellectually fraudulent; I’ve told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three times were in e-mails, and once was when I was drunk.

Still, I was never lying.

“I hate living here,” Lenore says after a disquieting silence. “I’m moving to Minneapolis after Thanksgiving.”

“You should definitely do that,” I say.

“And I’m moving on,” says Lenore. “I’m serious. This is the last time we’re doing this.”

I have never really known what “this” is, but I suspect she’s right.

It’s cold for August, so we go inside and snuggle on the couch. She’s playing a Ryan Adams CD, which is (apparently) all she ever listens to these days. In New York, I sometimes catch glimpses of Ryan Adams at a bar called Hi-Fi, and he seems to be living the most stereotypically hipsterish life imaginable (i.e., always rumored to be addicted to drugs, always rumored to be dating Parker Posey, always falling off the stage in Liverpool, always leaving angry voice mails for rock critics in Chicago, etc.). His life is almost imaginary, and it seems like his feelings and emotions should not relate to anyonart. But maybe he never loved her at all; maybe that’s his whole problem; maybe it was just an “Infatuation,” which is the sixth track on disc four. I have never understood the song “Infatuation,” just as I have never understood the concept of infatuation. It has always been my understanding that being “infatuated” with someone means you think you are in love, but you’re actually not; infatuation is (supposedly) just a foolish, fleeting feeling. But if being “in love” is an abstract notion, and it’s not tangible, and there is no way to physically prove it to anyone else…well, how is being in love any different than having an infatuation? They’re both human constructions. If you think you’re in love with someone and you feel like you’re in love with someone, then you obviously are; thinking and feeling is the sum total of what love is. Why do we feel an obligation to certify emotions with some kind of retrospective, self-imposed authenticity? For the first 30 years of my life, I had no idea that Stewart didn’t write “The First Cut Is the Deepest.” It turns out that song was actually written by Cat Stevens. Am I now supposed to rethink my previous appreciation for those sentiments? Should I now question their validity, since it turns out that Rod Stewart was just pretending to embody that worldview? If my only way to understand the world is through what I think and what I feel, how can thinking that I’m in love and feeling that I’m in love be relegated into the category of “infatuation”? What’s the fucking difference?

People always criticize Rod Stewart for having bad taste, and I guess I can understand why; “Tonight’s the Night” is a pretty wretched song, as was his cover of “Downtown Train.” His version of “Cigarettes and Alcohol” was ludicrous. But maybe there is a larger point to all those bad decisions; maybe Rod Stewart is just trying to explain that he doesn’t understand the world and that he’s just trying to figure it out through the things that matter to him personally, even if they suck (and even if they involve Jeff Beck). If all you ever do is drink brandy and chase women and miss those women when they leave (and then question why they were even there in the first place), that becomes the way you understand existence; consequently, that’s how you try to understand everything else. And that’s completely valid, if not necessarily universal. Rod Stewart may be a blond clown with bad judgment, but everything he says is true.

 

I reach Moorhead, Minnesota, at 12:02 P.M., which means I will reach Fargo at 12:10; Fargo and Moorhead are basically one town, split by the Red River and connected by the Main Avenue Bridge. It’s difficult to understand why anyone would choose to live in Moorhead instead of Fargo, since the only upside to Moorhead is higher taxes. I suppose people have their reasons.

It’s been five years since I lived in Fargo, and I was only a citizen of that community for four years. Somehow, it still feels like I lived there for two decades (it’s like the way Ozzy used to talk about Randy Rhoads, which I mentioned on page 109; in my mind, it seems like those four years in Fargo were longer than the 22 years before I got there and longer than all the years that have passed since I left). Whenever I return, I want to drive past all the things that defined my subsistence there: the newspaper I worked at; a bar called Duffy’s Tavern; the house where Quincy’s where we would drink sangria in the summer; a frontage road by the airport where you can sit in your car and listen to the Cardigans while watching Northwest Airlines jets land in the moonlight. I always want to return to these places, and sometimes I do. It’s always a mistake. It’s funny how vividly I remember those specific locations, but how quickly I forget that they’re all surrounded by strip malls.

There are probably 100 people in Fargo I’d like to visit, but I can’t see any of them; I promised my mother I would visit her on this trip, and she said she’d have lunch ready for me at 1:00 P.M. If I am not at my parents’ house by 1:00 P.M., my mother will assume I have hit a deer (this is always her first assumption when anybody is late for anything). From Fargo, it’s a 65-mile trip to my hometown. I will make it home in time, but just barely.

I grew up on a farm five miles outside of a town called Wyndmere, but my parents don’t live there anymore; they moved into Wyndmere proper 10 years ago. My parents are considerably older than most people’s parents: I’m 31, but I’m the seventh child in a relentlessly Catholic family. In fact, one of my sisters is almost 18 years older than me (I was born in June of 1972, and she left for college that August—we only lived in the same house for 75 days). Though it did not seem strange at the time, the way my parents moved into Wyndmere was a little bizarre: My oldest brother took over the farm when my dad retired, and they just switched houses; my brother and his family moved out to the farm, and my parents moved into his house in town. They just completely switched lives in the span of one weekend; they literally “traded spaces.” I doubt if this kind of domestic exchange is common in places that are not rural North Dakota. But that’s not even the weirdest part; the weirdest part is that my brother eventually decided to build a new house on our farmstead, and he intended to level the home we all grew up in; this made sense, because the roof leaked and it only had one bathroom and it vaguely resembled a middle-class residence in Appalachia. However, my mother insisted he should try to sell the house, because she is not one to waste anything, even if it has no value. This seemed like a ridiculous plan, but my brother begrudgingly agreed to advertise: Anybody could buy our house if they (a) paid $2,000, and (b) were willing to move the building off its foundation. Well, some optimistic carpenter actually did this; he and his young wife bought our $2,000 house and moved it 20 miles away. So now—if I drive down a certain road, near a certain neighboring town called Hankinson—I can see the house where I spent the first 18 years of my life…except it’s now in a totally different location. It looks the same, but everything around it is completely alien, and I don’t know any of the people who are living inside. And because the owner is a carpenter, he’s fixed everything, so it looks new; it looks the way it did in 1975, when I was three years old. Have you ever had a dream where someone looks completely different than they do in everyday life, but—because it’s your dream—you still know who they are and what they represent? Seeing my house is like having that dream when I’m still awake.

I careen toward Wyndmere on Highway 18, driving fast but on the lookout for deer. Everything is flat as a pancake; not coincidentally, I listen to Head East’s Flat as a Pancake. The reason North Dakota is so flat is because it was crushed by a glacier during the there was only one bullet in the gun. There was nothing my brother could do, except stare at this hemorrhaging creature and wonder how he could put it out of its misery before it had a seizure.

Fortunately, my other brother (Paul) arrived minutes later. Paul reads Louis L’Amour novels and played defensive tackle in college. He was (and is) a pretty powerful manimal; at the time, I think he weighed about 240. Bill and Paul both looked at this deer for a few moments, quietly wondering how they could end its suffering. This is a problem few Americans ever face: How do you execute a wounded deer? Do you hit it with a ball-peen hammer? With a shovel? Do you try to stab it to death with a pocket knife? There is no protocol for this kind of situation. Which is why Paul walked over to the deer, grabbed an antler in each hand, twisted it clockwise, and wordlessly broke its neck.

This is pretty impressive spine snapping, all things considered.

I did not witness this event firsthand, but it still taught me an important lesson: We turned that buck into sausage, and he was delicious. However, Paul refused to eat any of this venison, even though he had killed deer before (and would kill deer again). He could not eat this particular deer, always saying, “Every time I smell that sausage, I think of that deer’s big brown eyes staring up at me, just before I heard its neck crack.”

The lesson? America’s relationship to hunting would be far different if it always involved hand-to-hand combat.

 

When I arrive at my parents’ house, it’s 12:55. My mom is nervously looking out the kitchen window. I walk through the door and immediately see my father, my aforementioned brother (the one with Eastwood’s neck), my brother’s wife, and their three daughters (all of whom are smiling like cheerleaders for an SEC football team). My mother hugs me and mentions that I need a haircut; my father shakes my hand (perhaps he thinks I am running for town alderman). My mother has prepared roast beef, baked chicken, corn on the cob, squash, a blueberry pie, and 13,000 pounds of mashed potatoes. The universe appears to be in order.

We finish eating in less than 15 minutes (everybody in my family eats as fast as humanly possible). For the next hour and a half, we sit around the kitchen table while I answer remarkably random questions about my life; these queries range from “Do you have a girlfriend?” to “Does your office at Spin use electric heat?” My family is proud of me, but they honestly have no idea what I do for a living (I tell them about the dead rock stars I’ve visited, and the only one my dad has heard of is Elvis, whom he considers a yippie). I am informed of a recent tractor accident and about all the local high school kids who have suddenly developed insane drinking problems. At one point, my mom calls me a “crazy bugger,” which makes me happy. My mother has only three terms she uses for all criticism, and each epithet has a starkly unique connotation. The first level of criticism is to call someone a “bugger.” This is a minor insult that indicates you have probably eaten too many cookies or spilled a glass of Kool-Aid on the kitchen tile (in fact, bugger can even be used positively; if you give my mom a nice Christmas present, she is apt to refer to you as a “nice bugger”). The second level is “dumb bunny,” which was something I was called quite often; the dumb-bunny classification is levierely employed; in the 18 years I lived at home, I was only referred to as an “idiot” once, and that was when I hit the mailbox with a pickup truck.

After dinner (and in North Dakota, “dinner” is the meal you have at noon), I sit in the living room for 20 minutes, talking with my father about what he’s been reading (first-person accounts of World War II) and what he’s been watching on PBS (something about the history of the circus). My mom tells me she was hoping I could spend the night but that she knows I have to pursue my “business.” I mention that I just visited Lenore, who remains the only woman I’ve dated that either of my parents ever met (for five minutes at 9:00 A.M. on Thanksgiving Day 2000—and my mom hugged her). They still remember Lenore and mention that she is extremely pretty. I agree with them, and then I leave. All told, I spend only two hours with my parents, which probably makes me a relatively shameful son. However, I am so unbelievably glad my parents don’t mind that they don’t know any details about my life. They don’t understand me, but they understand me.

I drove into Wyndmere on Highway 18, but I’ll drive out on Highway 13. Filling up the Tauntan’s gas tank at the Wyndmere Cenex station, I can look to the north and see my high school football field (and the grassy, overgrown practice field that sits next to it). The practice field is at least 40 yards from Highway 13, a roadway punctuated by the Wyndmere overpass; the Wyndmere overpass is a mammoth concrete bridge that towers 50 feet above two lines of railroad tracks. When I was a seventh grader, I witnessed the greatest athletic achievement of my lifetime on that practice field, and it involved that overpass. It was track season, 4:09 P.M., 1985. A group of us were sitting on the grass in the middle of the practice field, pretending to stretch our hamstrings, dourly waiting for track practice to officially commence. Somebody spotted a sedan on Highway 13, crawling up the overpass. A jovial, sandy-haired high school junior—a fellow nicknamed Bubba, who also happened to play quarterback on the football team—was inexplicably holding a little rock in his right hand; he had picked it off the gravel running track that circumvented the practice field. For no real reason, some moron (I can’t recall who) casually said, “Hey, Bubba, I bet you can’t hit that fucking car with that fucking rock.” Without even considering the ramifications, Bubba whirled around and side-armed the stone at least 200 feet; it was like he fired one of those SAM surface-to-air shoulder rockets terrorists use to knock down helicopters. And he hit that fucking car with that fucking rock. It sounded like a roman candle when it smacked off the trunk. Nobody could believe it. We were all writhing on the ground, speaking in tongues, rejoicing like those kids in Portugal who saw the Lady of Fatima. It was akin to witnessing something that could only happen inside a video game. I saw Michael Jordan score 63 points in a losing effort against the Celtics in 1986. I saw Doug Flutie beat University of Miami on a 48-yard Hail Mary pass to Gerard Phelan in 1984. I heard about my brother shooting a deer out of a combine, and I heard about my other brother breaking its neck. However, those things will always seem easy, at least when compared to casually hitting a moving vehicle at a distance of 70 yards with a rock.

Some things can only happen when you’re young.

 

Flying through Bismarck, a city I’ve y should go downtown.”

I agree with the man. He is roughly 60 years old and wears a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie. He looks a little like Johnny Carson, but his voice is more like Tone-L?c’s. I like him immediately.

“Those people should be in a damn zoo,” he says. “Throw ’em in with the gorillas and see how much they wanna dance. Crazy batch of goddamn lunatics. You with them?”

“No,” I say.

“I didn’t think so. You seem halfway reasonable. You live around here?”

“No, I’m a reporter. I’m driving to Seattle.”

“A newspaper reporter?”

“Not really, but I used to be,” I say.

“I wouldn’t have guessed that you were a reporter, since you’re wearing short pants,” he says. “Do you wear a tie to work?”

“Do I wear a tie to work? No. Why would I wear a tie to work?”

“Why? What do you mean, ‘Why?’ Why the hell not?” says the man in short sleeves. “Always put a tie on. Always. It only takes an extra 30 seconds in the morning, and it’s always the smart move. Old-timers will think you’re an up-and-comer, young folks will know you mean business, and ladies will think you’re the kind of guy who might suddenly take them out to a decent restaurant. It’s always the smart move. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Well, you have time. You’ll get married. Everybody gets married, one way or another. And that’s important. Getting married was the best decision I ever made. A man’s wife is more important than his parents and his children combined.”

For the next 45 minutes, this short-sleeved man gives me a lot of advice. Most of it dwells on (a) the importance of loving your wife,¹ (b) the importance of hunting-dog ownership,² (c) why we have fewer windmills than we used to,³ (d) what’s wrong with the American League,⁴ (e) how to properly fire an employee,⁵ (f) why life insurance is a sham,⁶ (g) how to buy or sell a race horse,⁷ and (h) the complexity of human relationships, particularly when placed in a business setting. I do not understand what this man does for a living and I never ask his name (and he never asks for mine), but he has innumerable theories on dealing with thorny personalities and finding financial success. The theory I like best is his “Anger Scheme.” This old man is of the opinion that you can never really know someone until you’ve seen them positively enraged.

“People never show you what they’re truly like until you see them go ape-shit,” he says. “That’s the only time people say the things they really feel. Anger makes people honest. No matter how reasonable someone might seem, you never know for sure until they get mad. You, for example. You seem halfway reasonable, but you might be the type who’d go home and get a shotgun if I pissed you off.”

“Actually, I never get mad,” I say. “Every time I feel myself becoming angry, I suddenly become depressed. I don’t think I have the potential to get mbeen observed (please stay on the sidewalk). Was life in the 19th century so painful that living wasn’t even desirable? Existence itself must have seemed like punishment. Pioneers worked for 13 hours a day, slept as soon as it got dark, bathed in their own sweat for six months, shivered and fought pneumonia for the six months that followed, and inevitably starved to death. That was as much as you could ever hope for; it was their version of a satisfying life. I have to assume that pioneers saw the inhospitable landscape of Montana and immediately realized that most of their settlement would die within a year, which actually seemed reassuring. “This is perfect,” they no doubt concluded. “Maybe I’ll be dead before Christmas!”

This, I surmise, is How the West Was Won. Which is (not coincidentally) what I’ve just slid into the stereo; I’m playing How the West Was Won by Led Zeppelin, a recently released collection of live Led Zep recordings from the year of my birth. I’ve been saving this CD for rural Montana, since Montana seems like the only state where a 23-minute version of “Whole Lotta Love” would feel completely necessary. Whenever I find myself in an argument about the greatest rock bands of all time, I always place Zeppelin third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This sentiment is incredibly common; if we polled everyone in North America who likes rock music, those three bands would almost certainly be the consensus selections (and in that order). But Zeppelin is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they’re popular in a way the Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience.

A few years ago, I was an on-air guest for a morning radio show in Akron. I was on the air with the librarian from the Akron public library, and we were discussing either John Cheever or Guided by Voices, or possibly both. Talk radio in Akron is fucking crazy. While we were walking out of the studio, the librarian noticed the show’s 19-year-old producer; the producer had a blond mullet, his blank eyes were beyond bloodshot, and he was wearing ripped jeans and a black Swan Song T-shirt with all the runes from the Zoso album. The librarian turned to me and said, “You know, I went to high school with that guy.” This librarian was 42. But he was right. He did go to high school with that guy. So did I. Everyone in America went to high school with that guy. Right now, there are boys in fourth grade who do not even realize that they will become “that guy” as soon as they finish reading The Hobbit in eighth grade. There are people having unprotected sex at this very moment, and the fetus spawned from that union will become “that guy” in two decades. Led Zeppelin is the most legitimately timeless musical entity of the past half century; they are the only group in the history of rock ’n’ roll that every male rock fan seems to experience in exactly the same way.

You are probably wondering why that happens; I’m not sure, either. I’ve put a lot of thought into this subject (certainly more than any human should), but it never becomes totally clear; it only seems more and more true. For a time, I thought it was Robert Plant’s overt misogyny fused with Jimmy Page’s obsession with the occult, since that combination allows adolescent males to reconcile the alienation of unntinent. I look at a map, and I realize I’ve only moved an inch across the state. I’m something like three and a half inches from Washington. Geographic ratios hate me.

One thing everyone tells you about driving through Montana is that you can’t receive any radio stations, which shouldn’t be a problem for a man with 604 albums in the backseat of his car (I bought four more CDs in Bismarck, one of which was Garth Brooks’s very-popular-yet-still-underrated No Fences). However, things like this always become an unwinnable eternal contest with me; the fact that it’s hard to find radio stations is precisely what makes me want to hear the radio. I find one on the AM side, and it’s a talk show hosted by Sean Hannity, one of the many automatons on the Fox News Channel. I can tell immediately that he’s dealing with some sort of breaking news, because his voice has that “I’m actually being serious right now” inflection. My first thought is that Dick Cheney must have died from a heart attack. However, Hannity is talking about people who are trapped on the subway and smoke that’s rising from Staten Island, so my next thought is that somebody blew up the Statue of Liberty. “Fuck,” I think for a moment, “tomorrow, a thousand shitty newspaper columnists are going to write thinly veiled metaphoric eulogies about the death of Lady Liberty.” However, Hannity says everything appears to be under control and that this is merely a citywide blackout. “There appears to be no connection to terrorism,” he says, which immediately makes me assume it must be connected to terrorism (it’s strange how we’ve all become accustomed to not believing anyone paid to keep us informed). I try to call Diane on my cell phone, but cell phones don’t work in Montana. The reports coming over the radio are confusing; nobody seems to know why this blackout is happening. I pull into the first rest area I see (rattlesnakes have evidently been observed at this one, too) and try to call Diane from a pay phone. It goes straight to her voice mail. I leave a rambling message that asks a bunch of questions, all of which I know she could never possibly answer. When I get back in the car, Mr. Hannity is taking calls from listeners in Manhattan. All the callers are describing the scene like it’s Mardi Gras; people seem to be wildly enjoying this blackout. Hannity says everyone should buy bottled water and open their apartment windows. He congratulates the people of New York for remaining calm during this period of hardship, and he salutes them for not looting the stores and initiating a race riot. Christ. We have low standards in this country.

Since I can’t use my cell phone (and since even this AM station is starting to fade as I pass through the mountains), it’s impossible to remain engaged with what’s happening across the street and 3,000 miles to the east. Giving up hope, I listen to the White Stripes’ De Stijl, and it doesn’t remind me of anything that’s ever happened to me in real life. I play the Pet Shop Boys’ Discography, and all their seamless, flawless songs make me feel vapid and lonely (except for their cover of “Always on My Mind”—that makes me imagine I’m driving with a gay Willie Nelson). I play the Eagles, and I take it easy. Sometimes I find myself driving way over 100 mph, but there is no one around to care. This is what traveling is, I suppose.

My goal is to get to Missoula by 6:00 P.M. I get there just before 7:00. There is a hotel called the Campus Inn off the first exit, and that sounds ideal. Part of me irrationally fantase is massive. “The East Coast continues to suffer through the biggest blackout in U.S. history,” reiterates bearded jackass Wolf Blitzer. Whatever, Wolfman. I bet all my friends at Spin are really suffering right now; I bet they’re suffering from sublime drunkenness. I bet they’re all talking about how they will never forget this night for the rest of their lives, because This Is Living History. I bet they are telling secrets about their childhood. I bet they are holding hands while they walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I bet they are eating complimentary Snickers bars. I bet they are sitting on darkened fire escapes, confessing their secret crushes on each other. I bet unrequited romances are ending in candlelight futon sex. And I wonder who Diane is kissing right now, and I am certain it must be somebody, even though logic would suggest she probably isn’t kissing anyone. And I wonder whether she would be kissing me if I were there, or if we’d just be fighting about bullshit that doesn’t matter, such as why mastodons were better than woolly mammoths.

I always miss the desirable disasters.

There is darkness on the streets of NYC, but there is light in the hallway outside my hotel room; I can see it through the crack under the door. When I was five years old, I used to pretend I was afraid of the dark; I thought little kids were supposed to be afraid of the dark, and I wanted to be normal. Being afraid of the dark seemed like a five-year-old’s job. I would always insist that my mom leave the hallway light on after she tucked me in, but then I’d just lie there and wait for my older brother to go to bed an hour later and turn it off. I was always relieved when he finally flipped the switch, because that stupid hall light always kept me awake. Twenty years later, I tried to explain a very specific emotion to Quincy, and—as a metaphor—I said, “I feel like a five-year-old who’s pretending that he’s afraid of the dark.” Prior to this conversation, I’d always assumed every child had done this; I assumed every kid had pretended to be afraid of the dark out of social obligation, because this was just part of growing up.

Quincy looked at me for a long time after I told her this.

“You,” she said, “have interesting concerns.”

THE SIXTEENTH DAY

Friday morning in Missoula, and the sky glows electric gray. The air on my tongue feels like smoke, but in a good way (it’s like the taste bacon leaves in your mouth after you’ve sucked on the fat). I’m particularly groggy this morning, and it’s the first time I’ve felt “morning tired” in days: For most of this trip, I’ve slept with a soundness that reminded me of high school; prior to this trip, it had been at least 13 years since I slept soundly on two consecutive nights, which makes me wonder if it’s been 13 years since I’ve truly worked hard at anything. However, last night was an exception: I laid in bed and found myself longing to be in the blackness of New York, where I could have exception, they are unloved.

And, obviously, I am that exception.

I think Frehley’s solo effort is exceptional, Stanley’s is somewhere between “good” and “quite good,” Simmons’s is sporadically transcendent, and Criss’s totally has the right to exist. There are several moments of quasi-genius, most notably Ace’s unbridled guitar solo on “Rip It Out,” Paul’s (admittedly specious) argument for casual sex on “It’s Alright,” and Gene’s willingness to rhyme the phrase Living in Sin with Holiday Inn. These are all KISS records that don’t sound like KISS records, which always tend to be the best KISS records (i.e., Destroyer, The Elder, side four of Alive II, etc.). And as I listen to these recordings while rumbling across rural Montana, something is starting to scare me, and it’s not the demonic laughter at the beginning of “Radioactive” (which is the lead track off Gene Simmons, featuring guitar work from Aerosmith’s Joe Perry). What is frightening me on this particular morning is the realization that the only way I can intellectually organize the women I have loved is by thinking about the members of KISS.

Has it really come to this? Have I become so reliant on popular culture that it’s the only way I can understand anything? If wolves killed my mother, would I try to eulogize her with lyrics off Blood on the Tracks? If I had to describe genocide in Rwanda, would I compare the atrocity to the muscular drop-D riffing on Helmet’s debut album Strap It On? I’d like to think I would not. Yet here I am in Montana, and this is what is on my mind: Diane is sort of my own personal Gene Simmons, because she’s all about the bottom line. She demands attention. She’s an atheist who’s obsessed with her own Jewishness. She’s self-interested and intelligent, and that’s why I love her. Lenore is more like Paul Stanley—less overt about sex, but sexier. Perfect-looking. Fragile. Not necessarily immune to believing astrological bullshit. Seemingly happy all the time, but somehow more melancholy underneath. Quincy is, of course, Ace: stoned, cool, and the personality I secretly want to be. Dee Dee would be Peter, just because it seems like she deserves to be classified as an original member (metaphorically, I don’t think you can relegate the first person you ever slept with anywhere outside of any “classic” lineup; for example, if I was using Fleetwood Mac as the incarnation for every important feeling I’ve ever had, then Dee Dee would always get to be Christine McVie, regardless of who else I met later in my life). And this process does not end with those four, either; I once had an extended fling with an actress named Siouxie, and our e-mail interaction preceding said fling was so integral to my view of romance that I mentally compare her to Eric Carr, a man who actually played drums for KISS longer than Peter Criss (10 years, ending with Carr’s death from lung cancer in 1990). Eric Carr was a much better drummer than Peter Criss, and they both knew it; similarly, this actress was one of the those people who was completely aware that she was a phenomenal kisser. The second time she kissed me, it felt like somebody dropped a piano on my chest. But Siouxie came late in the game; she wasn’t part of the original group, and her technical virtuosity at power-smooching could never change that (for the same reason, it’s difficult to find vintage KISS posters featuring Eric Carr). I dated a photographer in Ohio who was incredibly earnest about liking me, but I never appreciated her when hydrated (from all the booze), and I was depressed about Diane (probably because of the cocaine), and I could not sleep (from the pot). Every 10 minutes, I was pissing like a diplodocus; every 11 minutes, I would get explosive charley horses in my calves from the dehydration. I tried to play soothing music (Rod Stewart’s Never a Dull Moment), but all the lyrics made me want to weep. And that’s when I realized I couldn’t weep, even though I wanted to; I was too dehydrated. It felt like my eyes were having dry heaves; my tear ducts were completely barren. And lying there in my bed, unable to cry, feeling the sun through the blinds and vainly trying to uncurl my toes during another round of excruciating muscle cramps, I found myself relating to Demi Moore’s character from St. Elmo’s Fire.

So that was bad experience No. 1.

The second situation was less physically damaging but slightly more depressing: One day in May, Diane and I played Frisbee in Prospect Park. It was a fine afternoon. But then we took a walk and started talking about our relationship, and it immediately became awful. We eventually went back to her apartment and embarked on one of those terrible discussions where it feels like you’ll never speak again, so you just keep recycling the same gut-wrenching conversation over and over and over, because even a redundant discussion is better than losing someone forever. And just as I was finally about to leave, and just when things seemed like they could not be any more melodramatic or irrevocable, Diane stopped me at the door and said, “Since I can’t seem to find a way to love you, let me give you the closest chemical equivalent.”

She handed me a sandwich bag containing one hit of ecstasy.

This was a painful thing to hear, but it was mostly just disenchanting. I spent the subway ride home wondering if Diane had rehearsed that line. I mean, who says things like that in real life? It almost seemed like she said it on purpose, just so I’d have something interesting to write about at a later date.

Three weeks later, I took that ecstasy at the Bronx Zoo. It didn’t do anything to me. The tigers still looked like tigers. But I was back in love with Diane.

THE DAY BEFORE THE LAST DAY

And We Die Young    Albinos, Mulattos, Etc.    Fuck Me Gently with a Chain Saw

At long last, Seattle. Lots of dead people here. If rock musicians were 16-ton ivory-bearing pachyderms, Seattle would be America’s elephant graveyard. And I suppose that could still happen, assuming Elefant lead singer Diego Garcia gets assassinated on top of the Space Needle.

There’s quite an impressive list of corpses in this extremely modern town. First you have Mia Zapata, the female punk who represented liberation and self-reliance before being abducted by a sociopath, raped, and then strangled to death with the string of her hoodie sweatshirt. There’s Kristen Pfaff, the Hole bassist and professional smack addict who died in her bathtub on Capitol Hill, Seattle’s coolie gay district. You have Scott Jernigan, drummer for Karp and the Whip (not really a rock “star,” I realize, but close enough) who had just died in June; his liver exploded after a bizarre boating accident on the dock of Union Bay. And one cannot forget the (entirely predictable) demise of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, a man who OD’d in perhaps the least rock ’n’ roll spot ed and died in a generic, five-story teal condo in an area widely considered to be the least-hip neighborhood in Seattle (it’s a block from a Petco). Then again, Staley’s condo on the 4500 block of Eighth Avenue NE might have been ideal for the hermitlike lifestyle of the typical junk-shooter, since there are lots of teenage dealers hanging out on nearby University Way. It’s also possible that heroin didn’t even play a role in his death—the big (albeit unsubstantiated) rumor in Seattle these days is that Staley actually died from huffing paint.

Perhaps you are wondering how I knew where all these people happened to perish; the truth is that I did not. A guided Seattle death tour was given to me by Hannah Levin, a rock writer for that city’s alternative newspaper The Stranger and a freewheeling expert on local tragedies. And of course, all these aforementioned deaths were really just a precursor to the Xanadu of modern rock deaths: the mighty K.C. That memory is what Levin and I discuss as we maneuver down the long and winding Lake Washington Boulevard, finally arriving in what used to be Kurt Cobain’s backyard.

“In the weeks before he killed himself, there was this litany of rumors about local singers dying,” Hannah tells me. Back in ’94, she was working at Planned Parenthood but already engulfed in the grunge culture. “There was a rumor that Chris Cornell had died, and then there was a rumor that Eddie Vedder had died. So even though a bunch of my friends called me at work that day and said Kurt was dead, I didn’t really believe them. That kind of shit happened constantly. But then I went out to my car at lunch; I used to go out to my car at lunch to smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio. And—for some crazy reason—my radio was on 107.7 ‘the Edge,’ which was Seattle’s conventional ‘modern rock’ station. And as soon as I turned the ignition key back, I heard the song ‘Something in the Way.’ That’s when I knew it was true, because the Edge would have never fucking played that song otherwise. It wasn’t even a single.”

The greenhouse where Cobain swallowed a shotgun shell was torn down in 1996; now it’s just a garden. One especially tall sunflower appears to signify where the Nirvana frontman died, but that might be coincidence. When we arrive at the site, there are four guys staring at the sunflower. One of them is a 24-year-old goateed musician named Brant Colella; he’s wearing a Glassjaw sweatshirt, and it has been a long time since I’ve met someone this earnest. Colella makes Chris Carrabba seem like Jack Black.

“I’m from New York, but I moved to Portland to make music. I’m a solo artist. I used to be in a band, but my band didn’t have it in them to go all the way, and that’s where I’m going,” he tells me, and then looks longingly toward the sunflower. “His heart is here. My heart is here, too. I wanted to see where Kurt lived and hung out. I wanted to see where he was normal. The night before he died, I had a dream where Kurt came to me and told me that he was passing the torch on to me. Then we played some music together.”

Colella was 15 when Cobain died. Last night, he and his three friends attended a Mariners game—Ichiro hit a grand slam to beat the BoSox—but Colella wants to make it very clear that seeing Cobain’s house was his primary motivation for visiting Seattle. He also wanted to make it very clear that (a) he hates people who wear Abercrombie & Fitch, and (b) Kur person, and that I do not have any understanding of death, and that I am looking for nothing.

 

I drop off the Tauntan at the rental-car return office, four hours before my flight back to New York. I’d like to say I’d grown attached to this vehicle over the past two and a half weeks, but I really didn’t; I could never get over the fact that the cup holder was exactly where I liked to put my elbow, so I was never truly comfortable. Details are important. I still hate cars.

With so much time to kill, I decide to check my e-mail one last time. There are three new messages. Two are about my upcoming fantasy football draft. The last one is from Quincy.

I don’t want to open it.

For the past seven days, I have been rechecking every e-mail I had sent to Quincy prior to my arrival in Minneapolis, looking for subtext I might have unintentionally inserted into each message. This is all you can do when a woman you think is going to respond says nothing in response; all you can do is open your “sent mail” folder and stare at missives you already mailed electronically, deconstructing every sentence and wondering if—somehow—you accidentally offended her. But now I’m going to find out why she never called me back. And I have a feeling it’s either going to be something horrible or something irrelevant.

I am wrong on both counts.

“Oh, Chuck,” it begins. “I am so, so sorry I missed you. I got all your phone messages, and I feel terrible. But something crazy happened the day before you got here.”

And then I know what the next sentence is going to say. I don’t even have to read it, but I do.

“I guess I’m getting married.”

The day before I arrived in the Twin Cities, Q’s live-in boyfriend—a likable architect who rides a motorcycle—finally proposed to her. She accepted. They immediately drove to North Dakota to inform their parents. They’re going to buy a house. They don’t know when the date of the wedding will be, but they suspect next summer. They’re freaking out, but this is what they want. They are now officially “they.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking that this is going to devastate me, because you think I’m still in love with Quincy. But I’m not devastated, and I’m not in love with her. I have not been in love with her for years. I want her to get married to this architect, and I want her to buy a house, and I want her to be happy.

But I still feel like I lost.

We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovab really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real—but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.

If someone asked Quincy to rank the romantic relationships of her life, I think I would place third or fourth. I might even end up seventh, which is a difficult thing to admit. But she will always be No. 1 for me, no matter whom I meet, and that has far more to do with me than it does with her. And now she’s officially gone, just as Lenore is figuratively gone and Diane is potentially gone. I’m still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person.

“Dr. Cotard. Paging Dr. Cotard. You have a phone call.”

 

“This is Chuck,” I say into my cell phone, as if I am inside an office instead of looking for food inside the SeaTac airport.

“Chuck!”

“This is Chuck.”

“This is Lucy.”

“I know. I knew it the very moment you exclaimed, ‘Chuck!’ What’s going on, my friend?”

“Absolutely nothing,” she says. “We are all at the bar, and the bar is wondering when you’re going to come back to New York. The bar misses you.”

“I miss the bar,” I say. “I’m actually in the airport right now. I will be back in the office tomorrow afternoon.”

“Excellent,” she says. “How did the trip go? Are you going to be able to write a compelling story that will dissect the perverse yet undeniable relationship between celebrity and mortality? Will the narrative illustrate how society glamorizes dying in order to perpetuate the hope that death validates life? Will you be able to prove that living is dying, and that we’re all slowly dying through every moment of life?”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“I think you should probably do that,” Lucy Chance says flatly.

“Well, that’s the idea,” I say. “But you know what? After I write this story for Spin, I think I’m going to try and expand it into a book. Because I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about Diane, and I saw that woman Lenore when I was in Minnesota, and just before I saw Lenore I met this amazingly daring rock girl who climbed up a roof in Minneapolis, and I talked with this interesting waitress in North Carolina who reads Kafka but lacks awareness of the Allman Brothers, and this totally fuckedup thing just happened with Quincy. And it suddenly feels like I’ve been inside a car for 1,000 years, worrying about women and thinking about death and playing KISS and Radiohead and all this other shit, and—for some reason—I keep writing all this stuff down, and I don’t exactly know why. But it all feels the same, you know? It seems like love and death and rock ’n’ roll are the same experience.”

“Chuck, please don’t write a book about women you used to be in love with.”

“Why not?”

in the past and in the future.”

“I know, I know. We’ve talked about this before. But who wants to read another book about some death-obsessed drug addict who listens to Fleetwood Mac and lionizes the women who used to drive him crazy? It strikes me as dubious. You’re going to become the male Elizabeth Wurtzel.”

“Jesus Christ, Lucy. You’ve really got it in for that bitch.”

“I just want to go on record as saying that the idea of writing such a book is dubious.”

“But if I don’t write the book, there will be no record of this entire conversation. Your disdain can only be voiced if I do the opposite of what you suggest.”

“Well, fine,” she says. “Just don’t complain to me when all those idiot bloggers write things like, ‘Ultimately, the author should have listened to his friend Lucy Chance.’ Because you know that will happen.”

“True,” I say.

“I’m just trying to be the voice of reason,” Lucy says. “I don’t understand why you would want to produce a nonfiction book that will be unfavorably compared to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.”

“Well, perhaps if I specifically mention that possibility, it won’t happen.”

“It might not even seem like a book,” Lucy continues. “It might seem like that Richard Linklater movie where Ethan Hawke talks bullshit all night to that French woman in Vienna.”

“I heard they’re making a sequel to that,” I say.

“I know.”

“I bet it will be awesome. Ethan Hawke is totally underrated.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. ANYWAY, have a safe flight, Chuck. Do you want to have drinks tomorrow night?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Outstanding. The bar will be waiting for you. Bye bye bye.”

 

Time to turn off my cell phone. My flight is boarding, but only the rows at the very back of the plane. I’m in 14B. It’s not my time yet. Which is perfect, because sometimes it’s nice to just sit in an airport chair and do absolutely nothing, except watch strangers go away and wonder where they’re going (and what they might be leaving behind). I hope the person in 14A has a magazine, because I honestly have nothing to say to them.

I am ready to be alone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not exist without the following people: Brant Rumble, Daniel Greenberg, and Sia Michel.

 

This book could still exist without the following people, but it would be substantially worse: Andrew Beaujon, Bob Ethington, David Giffels, Eric Nuzum, Michael Weinreb, Kristin Earhart, Rex Sorgatz, Melissa Maerz, T. Phoebe Reilly, and the totality of the Klosterman collective.

 

Chuck Klosterman would also like to thank Alex Pappademas, Jon Dolan, Dave Itzkoff, Greg Milner, Charles Aaron, Doug Brod, Jeanann Pannasch, Regan Solmo, Tracey Pepper, Caryn Ganz, Sarah Lewitinn, Marc Spitz, Jenny Williams, Ellen Carpenter, Lisa Corson, Maili Holiman, Alexander Chow, Amy Fritch, Cory Jacobs, Joe MejiaGreenwald, James Montgomery, Rob Sheffield, Dave Hollingsworth and Rudy Sarzo, Paul Tough, Brendan Vaughn, Kimberly Donovan, Kate Perotti, Ross Raihala, Patrick Condon, Jon Blixt, Michael Schauer, Chad Hansen, Dave Beck, Mark J. Price, Denise Bower-Johnson, Robert Huschka, Luke Shockman, Amy Everhart, Mark Pfeifle, Jon Miller, Nick Chase, Sarah Jackson, Ellen Shafer, John Lamb, Greg Korte, Karen Schiely, Laura Davis, Erin Schulte, Lacy Garrison, T. Cole Rachel, Gillian Blake, Jack Sullivan, Michael Byzewski, Tammy Swift, Matt Von Pinnon, Mitch Hedberg, Spalding Gray, God, and Mr. Pancake.

 

Killing Yourself To Live is dedicated to Quincy, Lenore, and Diane.