Vehicles, Baby + ANNOUNCEMENT

This installment really does exist as praxis for me, which makes it hard to hit “publish” on, to be honest, because I know it needs work! And, also, I have been trying to figure out how to write some version of this for easily eight or nine years now, so maybe this will help me figure out how to polish it better. It’s about 2k words on weird songs that become love songs, and also The Ides of March. 

ALSO IMPORTANT: WANT THE BOOK I PUBLISHED?

I decided to self-publish some essays that had seen publication on the internet and a lot of them are starting to just vanish into the sea, so I collected them and now there is a slim collection of books out there! And you can buy one!!! 

IF YOU ARE IN CHICAGO: You can buy one of these neat little books at beloved local bookstore SKUNK CABBAGE BOOKS in Avondale (Right around the corner from Hairpin Arts Center.) I am biased because Ren has done an incredible job with this store and community space, and that will be so easy if you go buy them there! Wow!

IF YOU ARE NOT IN CHICAGO OR FOR SOME REASON CANNOT GO TO THIS COOL BOOKSTORE: You can send me a note or FILL OUT THIS FORM . I’m asking $18 for cost of shipping/printing/also most of these I never made any money from but it was still worth it because it was a different time and I was shiny and hopeful then. If cost is a barrier, let me know, and we can try and figure something out.

This is a new big weird thing for me and I frankly feel quite uncomfortable but I am going to try my best! And unfortunately I am going to keep mentioning them in newsletters FOR THE TIME BEING!

Also I really do still run an advice column, and I miss answering questions, so tell ya friends or whatever.

Finally, I did a voiceover for this because I'm doing a reading this week and am practicing, but the recording sort of sucks so YMMV in terms of how much background noise you can handle. But if you want to listen to 2k words over 13 minutes instead, this is for you.

-—

When I was a kid the classic rock station was Oldies 104.3, and nights were ruled by Dick Biondi, and I can still sing how his name would jingle as his DJ intro. In my house there was a stereo and on the weekends sometimes my parents played salsa or folk music from Chile or Peru or Venezuela, but the oldies station prevailed, especially when my pa drove the car. There’s some indelible memory I have of driving up and down the street before they tore the middle school down for it to be rebuilt with “I Only Have Eyes For You” sonically pinned to the dark landscape in my head: autumn, red brick, sans serif SOUTH MIDDLE SCHOOL stamped big.

There were all these weird Midwestern or generally Chicagoland bands that kept their reign over the airwaves and the suburban fair and fundraising circuit. My bagel shop boss claimed she’d had a torrid love affair with someone in Styx, and I believe it. REO Speedwagon, The Buckinghams, The Chicago Transit Authority (they shortened it to Chicago, eventually) played often and posters across VFWs and Knights of Columbii from Waukegan to Joliet reunited them year after year.

Which is what led to “Vehicle” by the Ides of March being indelibly some weird, regional, anachronistic piece of the 70’s stuck as one of my real deal love songs.

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Twenty years later or so I’m surprised I agreed to it. It’s 2004 and a combination of physical transformation, the timing of adolescent counterculture shifts, and my ability to drive and have a job means after a fairly lonely and angry high school experience, I’ve found a social life for the last year of high school. I wear a lot of thrift store men’s shirts and brown Chuck lowtops and my rainbow pin on my surplus Medic’s bag. On the weekends late into the night I meet up with the smokers and indie kids at the Greek diner Mario works at and vibrate full of nicotine and mint chocolate chip ice cream with hot fudge. After curfew I sleep a few hours and go sell bagels and coffee on the weekends or after school. I manage to become a senior editor at the school paper and use my newspaper office key to ditch gym. My new best friend, Mar, is the Photo and Design Editor and I take my SLR to shoot swim meets or run and up and down the sidelines at football games, because there are no photographers, and I want to tag along with her anyway to pretend we’re cooler than high school football games. We copy CDs from the library or her older sisters and in the mornings I pick her up while we listen to Modest Mouse and I pray to not be late, again.

I write during classes I’m bored in or after school and slowly creep away from the endless fanfiction I used as lord and savior before I started writing poems or moody short stories about alienated protagonists with wildly inappropriate relationships with older men and women. They are not very good. T sits near me in Creative Writing, only available to Seniors, and for a while he annoys me with his long hair and sensitive thoughts. He does tech theater and we were paired up at a Diversity week event we’d been selected to go to - he might not be queer, but he reads as it. He is beloved by many because he is funny and tall and sensitive and drives to school with his twin in their big blue Volvo.

So when he asks if I want to work on a poem to perform for the fall Variety Show, I balk. I’ve been trying to do a little bit of live poetry at gay youth group, do forensics verse readings on the weekends, all of the poems about the terrible things that happen to women, because I am 17 and angry and sad about the terrible things that happen to women, and what will happen to me is still far enough off.

He asks and flatters me and tells me he thinks we could do something cool and after enough cajoling, I say yes. In hindsight I was nervous about something that was pretty much a lock: he was beloved by the Dance Coach who directed the show, beloved by the Pit Band Director, the dancers, the tech crew who were his friends, everyone, basically.

It was novel. We met up after school or at Dennys and cobbled something together. Being me, I didn’t like the idea of just one two-person poem, so I let him write his, I wrote mine, and agreed to do a combined spoken word piece to finish. I am cringing writing this, and I’ll tell you that my spoken word career ended with the last $50 bucks I won in college for one poem, and I still wish my friend Daniella had won with her improvised riff on Dora the Explorer smoking weed at that slam.

Then we got in and my problems began.

-

The High School Variety show is an odd duck, and I don’t know if they exist anymore. I don’t know a ton of suburban high school kids. The RMHS Variety Show had standards: the beautiful dance team got three allotted performances, the pit band played covers of thematic songs, people freestyled (“The Streets Of Woodfield Is Real!”), local high school bands played, people did awful improv comedy. It went up on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in November. It wasn’t full of theater kids or choir kids; a lot of people just tried out whatever they wanted to do. Here landed our slam poem.

T and I practiced and practiced. My stomach could barely handle the process of it all, but when we got our spot penultimate to the intermission, I was relieved to know I didn’t have to wait it out for the whole show. I let T pick the name of the act (“Don’t Tread On Me”, yes, yes, I KNOW) and when we finished, what I can only call a hyperlocal version of a supergroup came on. The 2004 theme was “My Generation” - the cotton shirts were really cute - but said supergroup was covering “Vehicle” by the Ides of March. They were sometimes a jam band and sometimes doing hardcore at the Knights of Columbus, and sometimes they were just selling drugs. But they combined their forces that year with half the school’s jazz band and our friend Squeaks was on vocals.

It’s an unmistakable song to forget if you’ve grown up in Chicagoland because it’s at once vaguely upsetting thematically and also a total banger. A friendly stranger in a black sedan inviting you to hop inside the car? Not great. But there’s Hammond B3 in that song and a weird guitar bridge and the horns that will ensure “Vehicle” can be played at any halftime show for the next century.

It can come on anywhere: the radio when I’m driving or a yacht rock/70’s playlist I made for the summer when I’m feeling wistful for something out of time. Ten seconds in and I can remember how it feels like to fall in love.

-

I didn’t cope with my crush on T well, probably because it snuck up on me. I was trying to get out of Action Heights and shoring up my pitiful GPA from being depressed to find money to go to any school that was a million miles away from where I was. I also had landed solidly in the realm of the teenage bisexual, and I felt embarrassed some dude had begun to preoccupy me. I had my own shit to do and I frankly felt like I was the better writer.

It crept up slowly. We’d meet up to practice and then end up with the diner kids, or I’d come say hi to my little brother who’d joined the tech nerds and feel my heart start to do something. But he was sort of dating this girl Ashley, who I mostly liked, even though we all knew she’d end back up with her 20 year old on-again-off-again dude eventually. Besides, I was still a veritably weird and angry 17 year old who was still remembered for kicking some asshole in the balls for calling me a dyke, in the middle of study hall. It all felt confusing and keen and it was 2004 and I at least I had indie rock, now.

It lit me up.

The week after the show, I had no idea what to do with any of my feelings. I rode my bike across town and pedaled through his neighborhood, just because, went in circles around the cul-de-sacs. Wildly embarrassed I eventually rode to the park across from the middle school and moodily smoked Camels while I listened to Iron and Wine, sniffling.

-

We did finally try to make a go of it, after a lot of teenage angst. After I admitted my giant crush and he gently turned me down and I cried so hard driving down Arlington Heights Road I had to pull over, after we furiously and secretly made out in his bedroom every weekend after that, after we went to the senior prom and slept in the backseat of the Volvo, after I visited him at Boy Scout Camp and he quit early to spend the last summer with me and his friends, after four ridiculous on and off again long distance years that no matter what I can’t take back, after we gave each other rings and said we’d get married, after we cheated on each other, after he broke up with me in stereo and told me I wasn’t the artist he thought I was in Dolores Park. It should have ended after high school graduation, but there was a lot of safety for me in our young and dumb and often sweet relationship. I learned a lot about the queer I am, about my gender, about things that felt good or things that felt bad. We wrote each other letters and made each other CDs and crossed the country on airplanes for each other. I still have the letters, with his drawings on the envelope, the neat capital block printing. I still remember our secret nicknames for each other. I still remember our secrets.

I fucked it up, again, a year or so after we were for real quits and I was 24 and decided it would be okay to meet up for beers at the Happy Village. We hooked up afterwards and I knew I was free, and I knew no matter anything I did or said would hurt him. I felt a little relieved and a little glad and very, very ashamed. The week before I entered inpatient, his sister came to check in on me and I finally gave back the ring of his I’d had. Sometimes I think I see him on the bus or at a bar. I have no idea where he is.

-

I miss so many of those feelings, and it seems strange to be able to touch the current of infatuation and in LOVE with something like “Vehicle” by the Ides of March. But “Vehicle” by the Ides of March it is.

Each day and night I doubt the poem will be any good. I am flummoxed each night when people lose their shit and scream praise at us when we finish. We enter from opposite sides of the stage and dramatically rhyme into microphones at each other. Then the lights cut and we bolt off while the band finishes lifting their instruments.

In the dark of the wings my entire body shakes in relief and adrenaline and some crew member grabs the mic back. The last show I bolt through the backstage tunnel towards the other side and we slam into each other, laughing and full of pleasure and hold each other like the war has ended. The lights go up and the band launches into “Vehicle” and we stand there, laughing and crying and hugging and it roars through me at a million miles an hour: I am in love with you. We grab hands and stand in the wings and watch Squeaks, generally a gangly musicals kid in a Five Iron Frenzy hoodie, prowl the stage as a bunch of kids who were on average negative twenty years old in 1970 lose their minds.

I can feel it in that song: my heartbeat, some long lost flush of fear and pleasure and joy and the feeling like, this is only between me and you and no one will ever have this like we do and not us ever again, the feeling of someone who saw me at perhaps the height of my teenage powers, literally reciting poetry staring into each others’ eyes.

It’s been so long since I felt something like that. Sometimes I’m sure it is something lost and gone, which is why when something kickstarts in me when I hear the song, I am sad and I smile and I think, out of all the songs in all the world. I wonder what Midwestern radio station or county fair carnival or street festival or Forest Park car will be playing The Ides of March and what the feeling will be like again and again into the future.

-

lastly, shoutout to Paul “DJ Scrabblor” Fitzgerald for bringing the Biondi to the undeserving!