Let Down
For the first time in two years, I went to Amoeba on a weekday. A Thursday, September 13, 2001. Neil was behind the buyer’s counter: a promotion.
“Percy,” he said. My name seemed to erupt from his mouth. “Whoa.”
“I know.”
“End-times got you thinking?”
“I guess. You’re buying now?”
He rolled his eyes, perhaps mature enough to realize that being a buyer at Amoeba was not a position of awe-inspiring power.
I tried to think of what to say. Let’s finish, is what I wanted to say. Let’s just finish already. Planes are flying into buildings and Joe doesn’t want me—let’s finish. Instead I said, “You want to get a drink when you’re off?”
His heavy eyelids lifted. “I’ve got plans,” he said. “Hip-hop show in the city.” He leaned against the back counter to make room for another employee to pass, one of the elders with ’80s metal hair. The store was eerily quiet, no music playing; you could hear the employees’ Converse shuffling over the dusty floor as they wandered, straightening displays. “You could come with?”
“Sure,” I said. His sideburns had lengthened, flaring into the hollows of his cheeks. I observed that I felt no attraction to him. But that was okay. My theory, which had arrived in full that morning as if implanted in my brain during sleep, was this: in order to close this anxious semi-virginal chapter of my life and become a fully formed adult with the capacity to find her own purpose, I needed to complete the act with the same wrong guy. I didn’t have time to start from scratch finding the right guy—I was practically about tograduate from college, for God’s sake—and I certainly couldn’t risk a fresh new humiliation with a different wrong guy. I knew Neil, at least. I knew how to avoid him. And I knew how the sex would go, at least up until the very end.
I spent the afternoon grooming and plucking, as I’d done the first time, then assembled an outfit I now remember as try-hard and culturally appropriative, hoop earrings and all—I never knew what the hell I was doing with clothes. He picked me up from my apartment in his same old maroon Honda Civic. I wedged into the back seat between two friendly dudes, and we drove over the bridge to a dark, clubby venue across the street from a floodlit grocery store.
The show was good, a trio of young, energetic rappers stalking a small area of concrete just a few feet from us. They would later add a female vocalist with a six-pack and climb the Top 40 with some of the worst songs ever written, but that was years away. Neil brought me a Long Island iced tea, a whole pint glass of liquor that I assumed was beer until I took a gulp and nearly choked.
“Isn’t that your drink?” Neil shouted in my ear.
I’d forgotten: for a brief time, when I was first learning to socialize, I had appreciated the efficiency of the Long Island iced tea. One and done, I used to say. “I’ve grown up,” I shouted back. The next two drinks he brought me were clear and short, but strong.
On the drive home, it was just us, so it seemed I had sent the signals I had wanted to send. He put on a Pavement tape, remembering it correctly as our only musical common ground. He went too fast over the Bay Bridge and excitement mingled with my nerves.
“You know the last time we spoke?” I said, grabbing the handle above the door. “I think it was some awkward exchange about a condom.”
Streetlights through the window lit his face in bursts, one after the other. He changed lanes without a turn signal. “No, I think it was me yelling down my stairwell after you—‘Come back! What the hell?’?”
“Oh god. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t sweat it. You were a freshman.”
“Sophomore.”
“Still. You’re a senior now?”
“Yeah.”
He made a gesture like this proved his point, and we didn’t say anything else. That he didn’t seem to want any more information about that night seemed odd to me, but Neil had always been odd. He merged onto the 80 and the car sailed north toward Berkeley. An IKEA sign visible from the highway teetered and spun; I was drunk, which I noted with satisfaction.
Both our roommates had people over so we did it in his car. He had a condom in the glove compartment, wedged between tiny tubs of old-school Blistex, which explained a lot about the way he always smelled, cool and medicinal. He cranked the driver’s seat backward and I got on top of him. It hurt just as bad as the first time we’d tried, but I forced myself to get through it. I imagined the pain obliterating my past, each thrust sending a black ink splotch over another memory, another childhood fantasy. When this is over, I thought, I’ll be wiser. When this is over I’ll be harder.
But it kept hurting afterward, after he pulled up at my house and said, “Maybe I’ll see you next global catastrophe!” and I stumbled up the stairs into my house, where I immediately decided I did not want to be. I tried to take my Discman for a bowlegged walk, but made it only two blocks before I lay down on the sloping lawn of a fraternity house, sore and nauseated. I rolled onto my side and hugged my knees.
OK Computer was the CD in my Discman, a time capsule from a year earlier. I had been in a Radiohead phase under the influence of the Rasputin staff, a portion of which was so obsessed with the band as to be incapable of discussing anything without steering the conversation back to their albums. Had I really not played OK Computer , or even used my Discman, all year? I realized it was true: I almost always listened to music with Joe now, or on my boom box while I studied, letting it fill all my space. It felt good to hear songs so privately again. I let myself be cocooned in OK Computer . Nobody paid me any mind when I threw up a little, sending a stream of Long Island iced tea trickling down to the sidewalk. Briefly I dozed off and had an insanely unsubtle dream in which my vagina split open as I walked, causing a whole bloody spectacle on Telegraph Avenue, children screaming, men fleeing.
I awoke to the album’s fifth track, “,” which sounded so perfect I played it again. Louder this time, so loud it hurt. I had a sensation of the song coming from inside me, the wailing weirdly my own. With complete certainty I decided the song was a retelling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I had just read for class—all that imagery of transformation, bugs on the ground, hysterical and useless, growing wings. Wings are typically a coming-of-age metaphor, I knew—they signified freedom, the ability to finally explore beyond yourself. But wings could also be useless. Wings could make you a grotesque.
I played the song again and it gave me the strength to stand and start walking home. I felt the pain subsiding the deeper I went into the song, the more dark layers I heard. I thought about how it must feel to be Thom Yorke, to have created such a perfect exorcism of one’s own misery, to be able to perform it whenever he wanted. Of course, Kafka had done it too, with mere words on a page, and even though that made the work less powerful—I’m sorry but it did, it just did—it was still something. I turned the volume down. I could put words on a page. Maybe I could learn to do it better. Maybe now that I’d been split open, made wiser, my words on a page could get closer to music.