A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  “Psst! Hey, kid! Mt. Labor: Low wages were born here and raised elsewhere,” he whispered loudly with cupped hands in my direction, as a few of his bag-boy friends laughed.

  * * *

  —

  For the next few months, I clocked sixty hours a week in that damn grocery store. Time slowed and the world outside the supermarket faded into oblivion. I came home exhausted each night. At first, I kept close contact with even the most casual friends back in Miami, whom I thought I might actually rejoin next fall. It seemed my friend Scott, an incredible singer who’d lived down the hall in my dorm, was suing the school after slipping in the dark in the dorm hall and breaking a vertebra. Big news indeed. And my roommate, Doug, had had a visit from the police. This was my fault. At the end of my semester I’d noticed a sign—STOLEN AUDIO EQUIPMENT! CALL IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION!—with a list of the missing equipment, posted in the music engineering department. I thought it would be funny if right next to it I posted AUDIO EQUIPMENT FOR SALE! MUST SELL QUICK—CALL DOUG GROBER, with the same stolen equipment listed at suspiciously low prices. Also, a fellow drummer by the name of Socrates, having recently attended a student Christian forum called “Rock Stars or Voices from Hell?,” had decided to smash all his rock records. Apparently, the AC/DC and Rush albums he listened to had backward messages that might force the listener to smoke pot. I’ve never understood how that works. Why should unintelligible lyrics played backward be so persuasive? Besides, I’d listened to all of that music for years, never even knowing (or caring) what the lyrics actually were forward, and I had yet to smoke marijuana.

  So this was my new life: a thousand miles north of my school, moving in slow motion, cutting open boxes of Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks. I shared news and stories of Miami with the mulleted stockroom guy, as we placed boxes of fish sticks on a pallet. He agreed with me about the backward messages. “Sounds like horseshit to me,” he said. Later, after work, he sent me home with a bag of weed—“Carolina Kick-Ass,” he called it—with a lighter and some papers. He couldn’t believe that I’d never tried pot. He also included a cassette of Yngwie Malmsteen, a famous Swedish heavy-metal guitarist who played a thousand notes a second.

  * * *

  —

  Each night I’d come home, put a Stouffer’s in the microwave, and retreat to my room. My poor parents. They thought they’d sent me off for good only four months ago. That had been their first taste of peace and quiet in seventeen years. But now, once again, there was one more shower to wait on before work, one more car in the driveway to move, and once again loud music blasting from my old bedroom.

  “Maybe turn that down a little?” Papa politely suggested one afternoon through my bedroom door, after a couple of knocks. He asked about my plans for college.

  “Well, if I’m going to go back to Miami, I’m going to need a scholarship,” I said. “So I’m looking through some ROTC brochures and I’m thinking about the Army—”

  “You’re fucking high,” he said. And disappeared.

  Coincidentally, just prior to that moment, I had lit my first amateur-hour doob all by my lonesome, timing it with an overzealous inhale. The whole loosely rolled joint, a couple of inches of badly twisted paper, had gone up in smoke before any of it could reach my lips, all in less than a second. I’m told if you roll them tightly this doesn’t happen. #ProTips.

  Papa, of course, wasn’t talking about drugs at all. He was just questioning whether I was cut out for scrubbing the barracks toilets with a toothbrush and following orders. I wasn’t Army material, no matter what the recruitment officer had promised me about being in the field band. From the song “Army” (The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Ben Folds Five), written a good decade later:

  Well I thought about the Army

  Dad said “son, you’re fucking high”

  And I thought, yeah there’s a first for everything

  So I took my old man’s advice

  By February, the correspondence with my former Miami classmates slowed to a trickle. It all seemed more like last year’s summer camp now. My tan was all but faded. My stitches were out, and I’d put away the jazz-fusion albums and the Ted Reed Syncopation book that all U of M percussionists practiced religiously. I traded in my thin-rimmed tiny John Lennon glasses for some thick black ones. I was cleaning up spills on aisle 17 and bagging groceries like a boss. I was doing what I was qualified to do—work at minimum wage. And that’s not hard luck. That’s just life. Still, it’s one thing to work shit jobs in high school, when there’s a theoretical life ahead. It’s another to realize the shitty job is your life.

  Then there was the matter of the math:

  $3.35 x 40 hours per week x the Rest of My Fucking Life = Not Enough Dough for University of Miami.

  So this is how it happens! I thought. This is how you become the manager guy who looks like Lyndon Johnson. You start out as a bag boy and you just keep doing it until your nuts drop and your parents die and leave their house to you. Frozen in time thirty years on, wearing the same white button-down shirt, tie, and glasses, style and technology changing around you.

  I shuddered.

  Okay, maybe I managed to inhale a tiny bit of pot with all that paper.

  * * *

  —

  After work, I found solace listening to records alone in my room, obsessively, for hours on end, like I had when I was two. I broke out my old punk and new-wave records, as well as new bands like the Replacements, who seemed to struggle to stay in time with three chords but understood life (so I thought), stories, pain, and irony. The Smiths too. In fact, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” came out a year too late, or that song would have certainly been my best friend as I fantasized how I would quit the grocery store. But this was a rather friendless era, and this music was my only company. I didn’t care if it turned me to Satan.

  I’d found no such company, advice, or danger in the kind of records that students of academic jazz were trained to make—the music I’d tried so hard to love while at Miami. I had been understandably starry-eyed about my peers, who knew the cool scales, could play the jazz stylings of the masters, and had real gigs after classes. Even if I felt they were a little mean to me. But I now imagined those same cool kids aging into cocktail entertainers. I was beginning to suspect I’d dodged a bullet when I was sent down from jazz school. Had I been fucking high? Why had I chosen to study music I didn’t even like?

  I was beginning to rebel against academia, but I can now appreciate that my short semester at Miami provided me with an invaluable harmonic vocabulary, all still very much a part of my musicianship. Half my heart has always been in primal rock and roll, but the other half will always beat in odd time signatures, warmed by gratuitously intricate melodies and fancy harmony—all of which was introduced to me in music school. My defection back to Team Rock and Roll was, in part, a defense mechanism that helped ease the disappointment of having been chewed up and spat out of school.

  * * *

  —

  But, still, something bigger was brewing.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe I could/should finish these piles of song fragments I’d been sitting on, so I might make a living making my own kind of music one day? The only problem was, I hadn’t come up with “my own kind of music” yet. Exhausted at the end of each day, I could barely get my shoes off, much less write a song. I remember telling Papa that I’d started nearly a hundred songs in my life but hadn’t been able to finish a single one, at least one with words.

  “Well, Benjamin,” he said, “maybe it’s just that you’re not a songwriter.”

  He was right. At that very moment, I was not a songwriter. I was a fragment-writer at best. I was a broke college dropout who lived with his parents and called himself a songwriter. I decided at that moment that I would do whatever it took to finish songs—good ones. I forged ahead in my room after work w
ith a notebook, no matter how tired I was. I finished verses in my head as I stamped prices on cans and pushed pallet jacks, grinding my teeth to the groove of my ideas.

  But the more lost I got in my songs, the more I fell asleep at the proverbial wheel at work. I was still a kid you wanted to keep away from the power tools. My chronic daydreaming and fucking up started to become more apparent to my co-workers. Near the end of my three-month tenure at Mt. Labor, I was cutting open cases of canned meat-stuff (that’s exactly what it was called) and was so spaced that I didn’t notice the teeming nest of white maggots that had covered my hands, making their way up my arms.

  “GROSSSSS!” A stockroom co-worker snapped me back to earth.

  It was like someone pushed up the “intense stink” fader on the mixing console of my olfactory system and hundreds of crawling white bugs suddenly came into focus. Whatever masterpiece I’d been dreaming up escaped out the top of my head.

  * * *

  —

  I know how I’ll get out of this shitty work, I thought one day while pricing apples. I’ll get a gig in one of those cheesy bands that play covers, like they have down at the Rhino Room. Certainly that must pay something. Then I can convince them to do some of my songs and perhaps that will lead somewhere?

  I could see it all as I double-priced the same apples by accident. I could hear the tinny PA system in the dive bar of my mind, as it played to a lonely scattered trio of people.

  Ladies and gents, we are…Pegasus Rox! And that was Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot”! Speaking of shots, folks: Remember, the more you drink, the better we sound!! Now, don’t go anywhere, because we’re going to play an Original! That’s right, by our very own local boy Ben Folds!!!…Some feedback and a lone slow hand clap.

  Okay. Maybe not.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after the revolting maggot incident, I decided to quit Mt. Tabor Supermarket. Fuck it. It’s not like I had a family to feed. I just walked in one day and gave my apron back like a total jackass, no explanation, and got in my car to drive to Charlotte to see a man about a synthesizer. Maybe the Clash told me to do it, I don’t know.

  Boj ruoy tiuq! Nnneb!

  Boj ruoy tiuq! Nnneb!

  Boj ruoy tiuq! Nnneb!

  That’s Ben! Quit your job! backward, for those who do not follow Satan.

  THE EXISTENTIAL CHICKEN DANCE

  QUITTING MT. TABOR SUPERMARKET FELT so good I figured I’d take it one step further and blow my meager savings on a new keyboard instrument. The Ensoniq Mirage. It was the first ever consumer digital sampler. It was like a combination recording machine and keyboard. You could sample any instrument you wanted or play prerecorded samples from floppy disks (look these up if you’re bored). I thought this was astounding! Of course, by today’s standards the Ensoniq Mirage is a medieval machine. An iPhone can do all that and more, is smaller than the floppy disks themselves, and doesn’t sound like it’s going to break while it takes fifteen minutes to load in a simple low-res sound. At the time I thought this musical weapon might change everything.

  I will be the next Thomas Dolby!

  However, after messing with it for a couple weeks, I lost interest. So what if I could say a word, like “nineteen,” and play it back on any pitch, “n-n-n-nineteen!” (Also look up the song “19,” by Paul Hardcastle, 1985.) The novelty wore off quickly. I began to sense this piece of equipment was a procrastination machine at best. Songs were melody and words, not all the frilly production around them, I reminded myself. Until you’ve written a great song, who gives a damn how it’s presented? Time spent sampling a washing machine or a car horn, looping it and playing a bass line with it, was time not spent on songwriting. Focus, Folds! Finish your songs! I was an idiot to have spent my money this way.

  But just as the expensive keyboard began collecting dust in my closet, an interesting opportunity leapt out of the classifieds. A German restaurant called Veronika’s was “desperately seeking” a live polka band to play at their grand opening. A real paying music job in the paper! I’d never seen such a thing! Local music ads were always full of garage-band auditions that didn’t pay. I hopped straight in the car to answer this ad in person before it was too late. I brought my keyboard.

  Veronika’s, overlooking glamorous I-40, was positioned more like a Waffle House than fine dining, and it didn’t seem close to ready for opening week. I walked through the open kitchen door in back, where I ran straight into Veronika herself.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked in a thick German accent, sporting paint-streaked overalls and carrying a can of Spackle. She and a small crew were doing touch-ups, setting up equipment and tables.

  “Ma’am, my name is Ben and I saw your ad. I want to be your polka band,” I said.

  I explained that by using the new sampling technology I could imitate an accordion and play along with programmed polka beats on my newfangled keyboard—a one-man band, for a quarter of the cost. Plus, I added, I could learn pop songs and play them as polkas. A fun novelty. I brought the Ensoniq Mirage inside and gave her a quick demonstration. She seemed to like it and immediately took my measurements for a pair of lederhosen and wooden clogs, to be rush-delivered from the Motherland.

  The pay was way better than at Mt. Tabor. One hundred and fifty clams a night, three nights a week! In one month, I would even earn enough to pay for the silly expensive keyboard. Then I could save for University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where, I had decided, I would give college the old college try once again in the fall.

  It was midsummer 1985 and I had my first regular music job.

  * * *

  —

  By the second hour of night one, the waitstaff were catching on that I only knew four polkas, which I brazenly recycled every twenty minutes. Their polite, automated waiter smiles soon gave way to scowls and rolled eyes, as they passed by with trays of weiner schnitzel and frosty mugs. But scowl as they might, the repertoire for my tenure at Veronika’s would remain, stubbornly:

  “Beer Barrel Polka”

  “The Chicken Dance”

  “Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay”

  “Edelweiss” (a waltz to mix things up, of course)

  Rewind and repeat, bitches—I ain’t learning one more polka!

  I learned that it didn’t matter how many times I played that damn “Chicken Dance” song. As soon as its first goofy strains of canned accordion oozed from my Peavey amp, the old folks would limp, wallow, or lumber to the dance floor, jam their thumbs in their armpits, and start flapping their elbows. And that’s before they’d downed a few steins.

  “The Chicken Dance” is Polka-Nip. Apply generously. #PolkaProTips.

  Later, when the bell tolled drunk o’ clock, I’d unleash my Rock Songs Over Polka Beat trick. (And the Veronika’s staff thought it couldn’t get worse!) If I’d started this job hoping I might date a waitress, I dashed those hopes with my music alone. And that’s not to mention how flattering the Bavarian lederhosen must have looked hanging off my 130-pound frame.

  * * *

  —

  Life as a college dropout cruised along as my electro-polka gig became routine. It was isolating. I didn’t mingle with staff, and the restaurant clientele averaged in their seventies. My friends were scattered around the country now. Mama and Papa would return home from their jobs around the time I headed into mine at night. It was my first taste of the nocturnal lifestyle and I found I preferred it, even if it was a little lonesome.

  With my parents out during the day, I could work freely and loudly on my songs. Though I wasn’t happy with much I’d written, I did have a few I could live with. Two of them have survived: “Video” and “Emaline,” although they sounded a little different then. “Video,” which made its way onto the eponymous Ben Folds Five debut a decade later, started out as a st
rummy rocker in 4/4 rather than the 6/8 dirge it became, and “Emaline,” which still sounds similar, used to have a lot of lyrics about shaving my head. (By the time of the song’s commercial release on Naked Baby Photos—Ben Folds Five, 1998—those lyrics had given way to a story about dating an unusual girl who is misunderstood by nearly everyone and results in the singer’s own alienation from friends.) I was also playing around with a waltz that became the song “Boxing.” It was all instrumental then, except for the single line of the chorus, “Boxing’s been good to me, Howard.”

  After a few months, Veronika’s and the incredible Hi-Tech One-Man Fake-Ass Polka Band began drawing a regular crowd. Loyal and eccentric, the demo skewed gray and happy. It was nearly all couples, because, after all, who goes to a polka bar to pick up chicks?

  My favorite regulars were an elderly couple, whose names I’ve long forgotten. Their eccentricity was worthy of a Tom Waits song. They cut a fine Viennese waltz, despite or perhaps because of the husband’s wooden leg, which required a conspicuous kick to the side to straighten it every three beats. He’d fought in World War II. She’d been a schoolteacher for fifty years. They’d lived all over the world. I thought they were the best, and we often struck up a conversation on my breaks.

  They even hired me one night to play a party at their home. They requested that I arrive ready to go in my Bavarian getup. And so I hopped into my 1976 AMC Hornet to make a long drive up into the middle of nowhere west of Winston-Salem, looking like an extra from The Sound of Music.

  They make this ninety-minute trek weekly just to do the damn Chicken Dance and sling Spaten-Bräu? I wondered.