Somebody Said
The next night we threw our stupid party. It made for an exhausting Saturday—borrowing a car, buying booze, shoving furniture around in an attempt to make our living room, which was my bedroom, suitable for hosting. Megan and I shared a one-bedroom unit in a dilapidated triplex four blocks south of campus, though the name on our lease belonged to Megan’s sister’s ex, who hadn’t lived there since 1994—which meant that our rent was well below market value, and also that we were terrified of raising eyebrows with the property management company and thus did not complain about the nonfunctioning oven, the shower that took twenty minutes to drain, or the hole in the back of the closet through which a thick tree branch was definitely growing. It was heaven compared to the dorms.
The party spilled out the front door and onto the sidewalk. I spent the night moving between clusters, laughing at things that were funny and laughing at things that were not. I had burned a perfect party mix but of course people put on whatever they wanted; by midnight I couldn’t even find my disc in the haphazard piles. I viewed parties like a job: they simply had to be done. Freshman year I’d been lazy about socializing—I’d said no when the heads popped in my door, spent Saturday nights tending to a poorly timed Elvis Costello obsession that dominated my imagination and endeared me to zero percent of my dormmates—but didn’t love the crushing loneliness that eventually resulted from this approach. Since then I’d been clawing my way toward a normal college existence, and I was proud of what I’d achieved: an apartment, one actual friendship, an impressive mess of inherited CDs.
The day after the party we cleaned in short, hungover increments until it was time for Megan to host one of her informal yoga classes. I joined out of necessity, since it was happening in my bedroom, and was already brainstorming a reason to excuse myself when I heard footsteps on our porch, the tin lid of our mailbox clattering shut. I stepped over the stretched-out bodies.
A blank disc in our mailbox read “untitled for percy,” an email for Joe Morrow scrawled below. The sidewalk was dark. All I could think was had he seen us through the window? The other girls in shiny black stretch pants, me in my sweats?
When I returned to the living room, Megan shot me a curious look from her sun salutation. I mumbled something about having a paper due. I hadn’t told her about Joe; I knew she would reduce it all to some boring crush. I gathered my laptop and headphones and set up in the kitchen.
Joe’s song was quiet but with full instrumentation, programmed drums, heavy reverb. A little Elliott Smith in the guitar styling. The lyrics were pleasantly inscrutable, with themes of gossip (“The night lit up with talk of your talk”), betrayal (“Let’s both be Judases, see where it takes us”), and looming heartbreak (“Awoke to the memory of the possibility of the worst”).
I played it again. It didn’t suck, which I recognized for the enormous miracle it was. His singing had a striking ease to it, like he opened his mouth and some beautiful, mangled truth just fell out. But the song itself felt overly considered, with plodding verses and a nice-enough melody that seemed to leave my brain the moment the song ended.
After several listens, I began composing an email response. And then the bubble next to his screen name turned green. The yoga concluded; girls began filing into our tiny kitchen to fill their water bottles. I hunched over the laptop, trying to stay out of their airspace, and went for it. IM was a new medium for me but I knew enough. I knew to keep it lowercase, keep it cool.
ileanpercy: hey
joeymorrow: hey!
ileanpercy: it’s percy
joeymorrow: did you listen already?
ileanpercy: yeah it’s great!
joeymorrow: thanks man i thought you’d like it
ileanpercy: i do wish it had more of a hook
joeymorrow: i think the verses are pretty catchy no?
ileanpercy: oh, sorry, but no way—the melody in the verses is super generic.
ileanpercy: and yet also over-written, somehow? it sounds kind of forced.
joeymorrow: damn
ileanpercy: but your singing is magical, joe, and the bridge is beautiful. so beautiful.
ileanpercy: and weirdly it doesn’t sound like a bridge
ileanpercy: there’s no big changes or anything, same line-length
ileanpercy: it’s just a better melody out of nowhere.
joeymorrow: hah i hate writing bridges, i just tossed that out
ileanpercy: if that’s what happens when you toss out a melody, i’m scared of your talent
joeymorrow: hah thanks. too bad it’s just a bridge, who cares about bridges
ileanpercy: well that’s a dumb thing to say BUT i was thinking…could you swap the melody of the bridge with the verses?
ileanpercy: then you would have a hook to end the verse
joeymorrow: what would i do with the current verses?
ileanpercy: recycling bin? they were really boring.
joeymorrow: damn that would be a totally different song
ileanpercy: you could keep the lyrics, just use the other melody.
joeymorrow: interesting
joeymorrow: i’m singing it
ileanpercy: me too.
ileanpercy: i think it works, right?
joeymorrow: dunno
joeymorrow: i’ll try it out
ileanpercy: rad.
—
I realized I’d been a massive asshole almost immediately after logging off. Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen. I hadn’t slept so terribly since the dorms, when I used to spend every night optimizing the thousands of social touch points I’d been forced to have in each cacophonous day.
Eventually I stopped revising and switched to crafting an apologetic speech. It was casual, sincere, amply self-deprecating. My plan was to deliver it on Tuesday, when I ran into him on campus, after the economics class I happened to know he shared with Trent in Haviland Hall.
The run-in worked: he was loping out the front doors of the building just as I walked by. There was a dark look on his face until he saw me, at which point it flipped to sunny surprise. I asked if he was okay and he waved me off.
“Zoe skipped econ,” he said. “You want a coffee?”
We went to the Free Speech, a modern café recently installed next to the computer lab, filled with informational plaques about Berkeley’s free speech movement that everyone ignored. We took turns ordering coffees and brought them to the outdoor deck.
“The song is so good now,” he said as soon as we sat down. “I’m freaking out.”
A loosening in my shoulders and neck, the muscles Megan called traps. I scrapped my apology.
“Still tweaking lyrics. They had to be changed a lot to fit that melody.” He leaned back against the concrete bench and blew into the hole in his plastic coffee cup lid. “Zoe says I owe you a beer, but a beer seems measly. Two beers?”
“Two beers sounds great. I’m just glad I didn’t hurt your, you know, feelings.”
“Fuck my feelings,” he said loudly, swatting them out of the air.
The girl sitting next to us looked annoyed. She was clutching a pink highlighter and hunched over a thick textbook, which she inched as far from us as our shared table would allow.
“Sorry,” Joe said, flashing a smile at her. “I mean, it is the Free Speech Cafe.”
Unbelievably, the girl smiled back. She returned to her highlighting noticeably less hunched.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Joe said to me. “Do you sing, or play, or write at all?”
“No.” I took too big a gulp of coffee and burned my throat. “I have no talent, just opinions about people who do.”
“How can that be? Did you ever take piano lessons?”
“Yes. I sucked. And I just couldn’t. It’s too important to me.”
He tugged a curl of hair at his temple. “But you’re an English major, right?”
“Only by default. I started with theater to get closer to music, but I couldn’t stand those cheesy songs, all that jazz-hands enthusiasm.” I glanced at our tablemate’s book: enough numbers to reassure me she wasn’t a theater nerd.
“Surely you’ve written lyrics?”
“No,” I said. The traps were tensing again. “I get paralyzed. I’m actually getting a bit paralyzed by this conversation, to be honest.”
He laughed and leaned back. “Okay, okay. Let’s talk about something other than music.”
We sat in silence for a second, then laughed at ourselves, playacting an old joke. Finally I asked where he was from, though I already knew it was one of those Bay Area suburbs that meant nothing to me, and then we were talking about our childhoods and he mentioned his mom had died when he was young. Diagnosed with melanoma the beginning of the summer before he started high school, then buried ten weeks later, Labor Day weekend. I had to go to the bathroom but I held it.
“Were you okay?” I asked. “ Are you okay?”
“No,” he said. “And yes.”
The sun came out, dappled through the low-hanging trees, and he pulled a pair of sunglasses from his backpack.
“Sensitive eyes,” he said. I remember this so clearly. The black sunglasses, the pile of curls, the blue sky and shuffling leaves behind him—the image still comes to me at random times. Then his eyebrows shot up over the sunglasses. “I almost forgot! Do you want to write a music column for our zine?”
The zine, he explained, was helmed by Zoe, with contributions from a rotating cast of a dozen or so women. Joe provided the occasional band interview. It was called Ring Finger .
“I’m not really a writer,” I said.
“Think of it as opinionating. You’re good at that.”
“Opining,” I said.
“Girls opining is basically Ring Finger ’s whole deal.”
“So is it like a riot grrrl thing?” I asked. “Because punk music interests me only up to a point, and that point would come fast.”
“Write about whatever you want. As long as the spirit is a bit punk—I told her you’d have no trouble with that.”
I felt that door pushing open inside me again. John Cale! John Cage? The liberation of Tina Weymouth! Curse words to my heart’s content!
We both had class but agreed to meet at the campus pub afterward so he could buy me a beer, which he did, and then bought me another, and then we got burritos and ate them on the side of a grassy hill in the dark.
The next day I bought a copy of Ring Finger at the bookstore. The logo featured an ink drawing of a ringless ring finger raised liked a middle finger, with black polish on a bitten-down nail. None of the names were familiar to me, thank God—nobody who had known me in my pre-Megan weirdo days. Zoe Gutierrez had written a long, smart article about her first period, studded with historical menstruation horrors. I liked it, but there was a heaviness to the whole thing, a want for humor and lightheartedness. So I decided to start there. I scribbled ideas in the margins of my lecture notes, on the plastic inner flaps of my three-ring binders, anywhere I could find an empty space. When I wasn’t scribbling I was wondering about Joe’s song, humming the bridge melody. I had this dreamlike feeling of nearing some place I’d been looking for—a vacancy just my shape, hidden inside an enormous puzzle.
—
That Friday night after I got home from my shift at the diner, there was an email from Joe with the subject line “DONE”:
my roommates are out tonight so i can play it for you if you wanna come over, the brown shingle house on derby by the church
I stepped straight back into my boots and walked to his house, a once-gorgeous Craftsman with a deep, creaking porch.
He smiled when he opened the door. “You’re here!”
“I’m dying,” I said.
He rubbed his hands together like he was about to cook me a really good meal.
His bed was in the living room, a futon folded into a couch, which put us in the same socioeconomic strata of upperclassmen—though a room in an actual house cost a lot more social capital. The mattress was so deep I had to tuck my feet up. I could see a sizable kitchen off the living room and a grand staircase decorated with college-boy mess: hoodies slung over the banister, a greasy bike chain curled on the first step like a snake.
When I looked back at Joe, he was shaking the mouse of a desktop computer. “Oh,” I said. “You’ll play it for me. I thought you meant you’ll play it for me.”
He turned, surprised. “Do you want me to play it for you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, whatever. But yes.”
He shrugged, then picked up a guitar from the corner and perched on the opposite end of the futon. “You should hear the track afterward, though. Beer?”
He seemed nervous. I shook my head, fighting a smile.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s called ‘.’?”
He cleared his throat and began. His guitar playing was good, fingerpicking assured. It occurred to me his hands would be rough to be touched by—or do calluses feel smooth, I wondered. The verses sounded as I knew they would with that melody, elegant and right, with a new lyric in the repeated final line that gave the song a clear hook: “Somebody said you said it was over.” He flinched when he sang it, voice cracking, and I felt with some certainty that I was watching a star—that the reaction I was having would be the reaction of anyone with eyes and ears, of hordes of college girls and sensitive young dads across America; I was not special. It gave me a surge of vertigo, like I’d leaned too far over the edge of a balcony.
The new bridge brought me back with a predictable chord change, a half-hearted couplet. It would do. A perfect third verse and that gap-toothed grin to finish.
“Holy shit,” I said.
He exhaled. “Oh, thank God.”
“You need to play shows.”
“I’m getting a band together.”
“I think my hands are actually trembling, slightly?” I held out a hand for observation and he lunged for it, clasping my fingers awkwardly in his.
“Thank you,” he said.