A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  FROZEN ON A SUITCASE

  I sat here on my suitcase in our empty new apartment til the sun went down

  Then I walked back down the stairs with all my bags and drove away

  You must be freaking out

  THIS IS THE SECOND VERSE of “Don’t Change Your Plans” from The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (Ben Folds Five, 1999), and it’s pretty much the scene on my last day in New York City, in November 1993.

  But let’s cinematically freeze this little man on his suitcase.

  I’d like to honor my two years in New York by closing my eyes to see what images light up before me. The same way I write a song or watch for lightning bugs. I’ll list them as they appear.

  Okay. Here goes…

  Drops of sweat staining open classified pages, searching desperately for work while living in a one-room attic apartment in Montclair, New Jersey.

  The smell of the subway system, and how it sticks to the skin. And a neighbor who tells me in his severe Jersey accent, “My friend, that smell’s what I call the wax!”

  Snatching the wig off my friend Ana’s head onstage in the musical Buddy—The Buddy Holly Story, in an improvised moment that nearly got me fired. Laughing, unable to deliver lines. (You see, I’d answered an open call in The Village Voice, and when the company saw I could play most of the instruments and do a little acting, I was hired to do everything but the role I auditioned for, which was, of course, Buddy Holly.)

  Looking at an empty wonderful open-loft apartment for rent out in Williamsburg. The apartment, which rattles beneath the train, is cheap (those were the days!). I’m thinking I can start a band and move there with my new drummer friend who works in the tape room at Sony. (I didn’t end up moving there.)

  Times Square, and that weird row of movie marquees on 45th Street with messages about the end of the world, and seeing a transvestite slammed against the Port Authority wall by a cop. Blood everywhere.

  Police clearing people who blocked the sidewalk on St. Marks Place, there to get a glimpse of Jeff Buckley at an alcohol-free café called Sin-é, where he performed each week. Capacity: forty. The sound of his voice too good to describe.

  The faces of my four actor friends from Buddy coming to support me on Wednesday at Sin-é. My crowd is about twenty people shy of capacity. Broken keys on my Wurlitzer electric piano.

  First blue glow of morning on St. Marks Place and a shirtless muscular man with long hair whirling a rope above his head like a helicopter blade—at the end of the rope was his pit bull, sailing around him in circles, hanging by his teeth.

  Here’s one more.

  A Christmas card from my friends Rob and Rob, a couple who also worked on Buddy. The card was a cartoon of them both dressed like Santa and dancing with their asses pressed together. It read “Bells on Robs’ Tails Ring.”

  That’s actually a pretty good summing up of my time in the New York area. But there’s one week that I shouldn’t leave out. The week that led to my sitting on a suitcase, right before I left town.

  So let’s keep the poor little man frozen on his suitcase for a few more moments and back up to a gig I’d played the week prior.

  * * *

  —

  The Bitter End, on Bleecker Street, is legendary for being many performers’ first New York gig. From Woody Allen to Lady Gaga. But it’s anything but glamorous, or even cool. Mostly you’ll see cover bands trying out their originals, hoping to be discovered, six to ten bands a night. Such was my experience. And having just rocked twenty people, mostly friends and families of the other acts that night, I went to collect my fifty bucks, only to be told that I owed the Bitter End a hundred. The soundman had discovered the strings I busted on the house Yamaha piano and was charging me fifty bucks apiece, which I didn’t have. My single guest that evening was a music manager named Alan Wolmark, whom I’d met recently in the elevators of Sony Publishing. He saw me struggling to deal with the Bitter End management and he stepped up and took care of it. I don’t know if Alan paid the club manager himself or if he just told him to leave me alone in some convincing New York language. Alan and I sat down, had a drink and a chat. He seemed very interested in my idea to start a piano band, no guitar. I explained it wouldn’t be a jazz trio, like you might expect, but would have distorted and grungy bass and drums. It would be a piano band for the nineties. One that rocked.

  Nearly a week later, Alan and his wife, Annette, came rocking up to Sin-é, where I had established a Wednesday-night residency. Alan and Annette had plenty of space to park their motorcycles, because, unlike Jeff Buckley’s gigs, mine didn’t spill out into the sidewalk. They sat down right in front of my Wurlitzer electric piano, expanding the crowd to about six. When I finished my set, I was introduced to Annette and prepared to receive my compliments, but instead Alan said, “Not so good tonight.”

  “Really?” I laughed, assuming he was joking.

  “No. Sorry. I’m very serious. It wasn’t at all what I saw at the Bitter End. Not very good.”

  Actually, I had to agree. I’m a real-piano player, and not an electric-piano player. I felt like Keith Richards being forced to play banjo. The Bitter End baby grand Yamaha, even out of tune, was far more exciting. But New York was not the place to lug a baby grand around, and so I had to make do with an electric most of the time.

  North Carolina, however, brimming with musicians and great rock venues, was a place you could lug a piano around. The commercial music world was completely upside down in 1993 with the indie/grunge revolution. No music scene was more liberated than Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which never quite got on board with the polish of the eighties in the first place. As soon as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and that host of others busted the mainstream door down, all eyes were on places like Chapel Hill, where records were made—rough-and-tumble ones, not demo tapes.

  I told Alan that as I listened to Liz Phair’s new record the night before, it felt as though my “people” had arrived. Finally, some grit, some antiheroes, contradictory lyrics, rough edges, imperfect singing—something new. My rough plan had been to move to Brooklyn where artists were taking over cheap lofts and start a band, but a storm of creative visualization was gathering again, and I could so clearly envision a band back in North Carolina instead. Alan egged me on.

  “Do it,” he said. “What have you got going here? Just go while the time is right.”

  “Well, what about my plans for a band here? My upcoming theater auditions?” I asked, since this old man (he was in his early forties!) seemed to know things. My work in the musical-theater piece Buddy had gotten me into Equity, the stage-actors union, and that was opening up a few opportunities. Alan saw those opportunities as distractions. I should be focused on my music.

  “Nah. Do it. Go back to North Carolina.”

  Annette nodded. I suddenly noticed how much leather these two were wearing.

  This spontaneous plan had a hole in it, though. Anna was flying up to New York the very next day. She’d gotten an impressive job at MTV. We’d been separated for nearly two years, but we were still a sort of team. She had even come up to visit while I was living in Montclair, New Jersey, and I had been happy to introduce her to my new friends as my wife, even though I doubt I’d ever mentioned I had a wife before. We were winging it. Being buds isn’t enough to sustain a marriage. The shame of divorce was the last tiny thread holding us together. We were both solidly on separate paths. Either way, I had just scored a free house-sitting gig in a wonderful three-story brownstone in Jersey City—an easy commute for her new job. And, separate beds or not, it seemed like a good arrangement.

  * * *

  —

  Now we can unfreeze the sad Ben on the suitcase and keep the reel running.

  …But what’s this? He still looks frozen. He’s not moving.

  Well
, that’s because I actually sat on that damn suitcase, frozen in indecision, most of the day. I didn’t move for hours. Anna was to arrive in the late afternoon, and the plan had been to hop the PATH train into the city to see an MTV taping of Nirvana Unplugged. Yes, that one. That morning, however, my creative visualization had crashed my entire nervous system and I found myself paralyzed on my luggage. Should I stay or should I go?

  Every selfish cell in my body said, Go to North Carolina now! It’s time! Leave a note! Anna will be fine! Start the car and GO!

  There were some decent unselfish cells in me too, but those cells were being shouted down by the majority. The decent minority tried to hold a filibuster and explain that leaving a Southern girl who’s just come to town, still technically my wife (and my best friend), in a slightly suspect neighborhood, without at least sticking around a week to help her set up—well, that’s plain wrong. Couldn’t I stay and see this Nirvana TV taping, help get Anna settled, have a discussion, and then leave in a few days?

  But then I thought, what if those few days led to endless wallowing in indecision, with all that back and forth, hot and cold, for months on end? What if someone gave us one of those awful Save Your Marriage books and we wasted a year on marriage therapy? I could end up stuck in New York another year while some other piano band took my rightful spot. Anna and I had been separated for so long it all seemed like a done deal. We were over. Why the charade? Just go.

  I learned something about myself at that moment, frozen on that suitcase, clutching a set of keys, as the sun inched across the floor. I realized, when it came to my musical ambition, I was not going to be stopped. I had been fooling myself if I thought I was taking my career in stride, that I didn’t have some very lofty goals, or that I was always a nice guy. All along I had really been one of those assholes who was out for himself. That creative-visualization stuff? That was pure unadulterated ambition, dressed up in some pseudo-spiritualism. Sure, I was a hard worker and I was polite and fair. Kind, courteous, empathetic, a good listener. All of that. But all that good-guy-from-N.C. shit always melted away at the first threat to a music career that I believed was rightfully mine. I was ready to admit that. Sitting there on that suitcase was about coming to terms with who I was and what my priorities were.

  Moments of self-honesty are often laced with selfishness. I’m not proud of my selfishness, but we’ve all seen how acts of honest selfishness can often unblock the way and liberate others to live their lives. At least then everyone knows the truth and can carry on. I’ve reflected on this moment many times when considering the amazing man that Anna soon met, to whom she’s still married, and the two wonderful kids they had, who are now themselves nearly adults.

  It was midafternoon when I finally unfroze and stood up. I left a note for Anna and gripped the handle of my poor beat-up beige luggage. In white tube socks and Teva sandals (yes, laugh all you want), and a massive backpack on my shoulders, I started the old Volvo and headed toward the Jersey Turnpike. Heading south for an all-night drive to North Carolina, I could see through the leafless trees along I-95 that the holiday season was already gearing up. There was even a nativity scene at the truck stop where I grabbed some junk food for dinner at midnight. You always notice the holidays more when you feel the most alone.

  I was twenty-seven years old, alone as alone could be, with more highway in my future than I could even yet imagine. I was off to find a drummer and bassist, a van with which to move my piano, and a small rental house in Chapel Hill, where in a few months a deputy sheriff would serve me my first divorce papers while my new neighbors watched. But I didn’t yet know what lay ahead, beyond the headlights of my Volvo, as I sang along to its distorted radio with one hand on the wheel—the other brushing tenacious white donut powder off my lap.

  Merry Christmas 1993.

  BFF

  COMING BACK TO NORTH CAROLINA, my to-do list looked something like this:

  Call around to get names of bassists and drummers. Maybe an accordion player?

  Find house to rent. Chapel Hill? Maybe Asheville?

  Find a van for moving piano/touring.

  Pick up piano and other stuff from storage in Nashville.

  This list looked quite similar to the one I’d made a few years ago, before embarking on Majosha, only the circumstances had shifted. I now had more experience, many more songs, and some friends in the business. And I felt the music scene itself was changing quickly in my favor. I’d felt very out of step with the music of the eighties. The polish, the theater, the style and content. But the winds of popular music now seemed solidly behind my sails. Overnight, my boy-next-door musical voice felt relevant. It was as if “my people” had risen from the rubble after Nirvana blew the roof off the music business, and they had infiltrated the mainstream.

  It wasn’t just grunge that Nirvana ushered in. They introduced a far-less-formal way of looking at things. Music was suddenly less slick, more cerebral, like my music! On my all-night drive down I-95, I was hearing music like “Divorce Song” by Liz Phair, “Low” by Cracker, and “Linger” by the Cranberries. On commercial radio! I felt confident that my years of music-business rejection were solidly in the rearview and that what I had to say would now be granted a listen.

  * * *

  —

  I pulled into Winston-Salem just before the sun rose. My parents weren’t expecting me, so I waited for daylight in the Cloverdale Shopping Center parking lot with the car heat blasting, an apple, some chips, and a Mountain Dew. There was one other car in the lot, and I recognized the man sleeping in it from kindergarten and grade school. We caught up briefly. He had just left his wife and was sleeping in the parking lot, trying to decide what to do.

  It hadn’t dawned on me yet what it would mean to be divorced and officially on my own. It was only a week ago that I had first considered moving back to North Carolina. Before that I didn’t have any particular vision of the future. It had been some vague, unlit horizon. Now it was a blinding white page. We all experience a small handful of these moments in our lives, and as scary as they are, they should also be cherished. Electric stillness. Between chapters, between storms, completely up in the air. That split second between breathing in and breathing out. This is also the headspace I associate with the birth of new songs.

  Once the sun came up and I had a morning nap at my parents’ apartment, I learned they too would soon be getting a divorce. During a more stable time in my life, this news might have come as more of a shock. But the ground was shifting beneath my feet. I was also grateful I still had parents, even if they weren’t together anymore. Happiness, health, and following your path suddenly seemed more important than marital status, belongings, title, or home address. I only hoped that this was the best for them as we all lurched into the unknown.

  * * *

  —

  Not wanting to wallow in too much feeling, I did what I always do when things get overwhelming: I got busy. There was a band to start and a music business to conquer. I started with the only call that would be necessary, and that was to my brother, Chuck. He knew all the local musicians, and they all knew Chuck. Chuck’s band, Bus Stop, was doing quite well. They had even done a national television contest. When I described to Chuck the kind of bassist I was looking for—a rocker who wouldn’t be afraid of some distortion and shredding, who could sing and looked good—Chuck told me to look no further than Robert Sledge. Robert’s band, Toxic Popsicle, had made quite a splash regionally. They were part metal, almost jam, kind of onslaught-of-percussion rock, and some Perry Farrell on top? I guess. I hate to describe music like that. Look them up—Toxic Popsicle. Or take my word for it. They were good.

  I met up with Robert in Greensboro, where he had just moved in temporarily with his parents. His life was also up in the air. We snuck into a practice room at UNC–G to meander through some fairly pointless jamming, which told me very
little about his musicianship as we “rocked out” mindlessly with his portable amp and a student piano, on a G7 chord. He had a high tenor voice, which he wasn’t shy to use, and he was ready to start a band. Plus, he had been considering a move to Chapel Hill anyway, so he offered to go in on a rental house. This was good enough for me! I could check that one off. Bassist. Next.

  A few days later, I went on a mission to Chapel Hill to find a house for Sledge and me to rent. After exhausting the classifieds, which flapped around in the freezing wind as I tried to pin them down with a Sharpie, I took a break from the pay phone to slip inside a warm little café, and that’s where I ran into Darren Jessee. He was twenty-three. I’d met him before once, in Nashville, but I’d never heard him play. We shot the shit for a while and I decided that he had art in his bones. He said he sang and wrote songs too. He seemed like a rock star to me, and, most important, he was in limbo and available too, just having moved to Chapel Hill. November 1993: Less than a week back in North Carolina and I had my bassist and drummer sorted. Gotta love that creative visualization. Now on to reality. What do we actually sound like together?

  * * *

  —

  A couple weeks before Christmas Day, the three of us had a little jam together in the house where Darren was living. It was the first Ben Folds Five rehearsal. We didn’t have mics or anything. You really couldn’t hear what was going on. It just sounded like noise, but I didn’t care. I could visualize it all, like Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, shooting scenes in one take and moving on as the crew scratched their heads. Certainly I wanted to vet a band a little more than this? Robert phoned me afterward to recommend a couple other drummers, and Darren also called, with the name of another bassist. Each understandably assumed that we were still in audition mode. But I wasn’t interested in slowing down or looking before leaping. I reported back to Alan that we had a band and would be ready to play gigs soon.