By itself, the song is nice. I can appreciate it. But for me, my dislike of this band and this song comes down to one thing: sex. Every generation has a song that becomes the soundtrack for lost virginities. This was my generation’s. Dave Matthews wrote this song, and hundreds of thousands of white high school guitarists played their way into sex with it. And every time I hear it, I’m reminded that I was not one of them. So fuck this song.
“The Wind Cries Mary” The Jimi Hendrix Experience
When I’d saved up enough money, I decided it was time to get myself a real electric guitar. I didn’t have a specific model in mind, because I was working under the constraints of a modest budget. But I figured that anything would be an upgrade over my current 9-volt-powered “ax.”
I stopped in a local guitar shop, just off of South Street, and was immediately met by a sales rep. He was in his late thirties or early forties, was skinny and had tattoos, and almost certainly had a criminal record (but for nothing major—maybe just possession or loitering). He asked me what I was looking for and I explained my situation.
The guitar salesman walked over to a wall of guitars and pulled down an off-white Fender Stratocaster. It looked just like the one Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. It had caught my eye when I walked into the store, but I assumed it was out of my price range.
As he started to plug it in, he asked me, “You know Jimi Hendrix, right?” When I responded in the affirmative, he said, “Then you probably know this one.” He checked the volume on the amp, settled the guitar onto his shoulder, and played the first three chords of “The Wind Cries Mary.”
At that point, he could have stopped and said, “The guitar costs fifteen thousand dollars. And to get it, you’ll also need to rob that clothing store over there across the street for me.” Instead, he played through the song as he spoke. “It’s not American-made, but as you can see, it’s got a real nice reverb sound. And it’s a very good-looking guitar, and in your price range.” At least, this is what I think he said—I was too busy focusing on the most beautiful noises coming out of an electric guitar I’d ever heard.
After the song was through, he asked if I wanted to try it. I did. But not after watching him play it. Instead, he gave me the guitar and I held it for a moment or two before telling the salesman that yes, I wanted it. No need to play it. I wanted it.
I took the guitar home that day and plugged it into the amp I’d borrowed from a friend and played “The Wind Cries Mary” (conservatively) two thousand times. I knew the song and had played it often on my crappy 9-volt guitar. But playing it on that off-white Strat brought me closer to Rock Godness than I’d ever felt before. That the guitar was not made in America like a real Strat and was perhaps made in Papua New Guinea didn’t matter to me at all. For the first time, I felt like a real musician. A real, cool musician.
“How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Could Have Me)?” The Spin Doctors
“How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Could Have Me)?” could be the title of the romantic history of my high school years. My only edit would be to include a subtitle: “Loneliness, Lust, and Other Misguided Thoughts of a Teenager Who, My God, Would Do Anything for a Goddamn Girlfriend Already.” I know it’s too long, and I’m not married to it. Suggestions are welcome.
In this song, the protagonist expresses disbelief that the woman he feels affection for—and who seems to feel some affection for him—chooses to be with someone else. He frames this rejection within poetic, quasi-erudite lyrics, making references to Hamlet’s Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, seraphim and St. Christopher.
It’s not quite right to say that I loved this song as a teenager; I was this song as a teenager. It’s like my fifteen-year-old self wrote this song after a particularly painful house party at which my current crushee spent an hour in the yard making out with the captain of the basketball team. So this was my anthem, my solace whenever I was feeling blue. Just me, home from the party, alone in my bedroom with my headphones on, listening to this song, unsure of why I wasn’t scoring chicks (as I ate a piece of cake), telling myself that I was a good catch (as I twirled my long, greasy hair), knowing that sometime soon, no matter what, I’d meet my soul mate (as I picked chunks of said cake out of my clear braces). Yes, someday soon I would find love (as I took off the sweatpants I wore to the party). The Spin Doctors understood where I was coming from. And so would my soul mate (as I finished the last of my chocolate milk).
lazy rider
By the end of my sophomore year, it became apparent that I was living a double life. Not in a mild-mannered-student-by-day/renowned-orgy-master-by-night sort of way. But socially.
Despite my misgivings about attending a high school at which the majority of the student body was from the suburbs or the nicer parts of Philadelphia and had eaten seafood before, I had little trouble fitting in at the Prep. When I first started, maybe I told a white lie here and there to fit in at a school where so many students came from well-heeled families—lies like my mom had sung back-up on the song “Ghostbusters,” or that my dad roomed with Mike Schmidt for seven weeks in the winter of 1973. But it turned out that such fabrications were unnecessary. Indeed, there was not much difference between me, a nerdy kid from South Philly, and my buddy Kyle, a nerdy kid from Gloucester City, New Jersey, who, despite being only slightly tanner than a sheet of loose leaf and having the build of a walking diving board, was so well-versed in modern hip-hop that in some academic circles he was considered an expert on the Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) album. Nor was there much difference between me and my buddy Paul, a nerdy kid from Havertown, a nice suburb of Philly, who, at six-foot-six, could dunk a basketball but dressed like Robert Smith from the Cure and worshipped Rush Limbaugh. We were awkward teens, geeks throwing ourselves headlong into our newfound passions, whether they revolved around the Wu, conservative radio talk show hosts, or, in my case, the teachings of Lennon-McCartney.
I must pause for a moment so that I can properly define the word nerd, as I have been using it liberally. The term nerd immediately conjures up what I will call the classic nerd: someone with thick glasses, acne, a pocket protector, and no social skills; the guy who gets picked on by the bully who makes him do his math homework. Meek and weak, there is nothing redeeming about the classic nerd—not even his mighty intellect. My Prep friends and I were not this type of nerd.
Then we have the modern nerd, far and away different from the classic nerd. The modern nerd is cool. Modern nerds invent things like Facebook and Twitter. Modern nerds form bands like Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend. Modern nerds make lots of money and fuck your girlfriend in the bathroom of the club when she and her friends have girls’ night out and you and your buddies stay in to watch a college football bowl game. My Prep friends and I were not this type of nerd either.
We were somewhere in between the classic nerd and the modern nerd. Part of the beauty of the Prep was that it fostered an environment in which smart kids could bond because, for the first time, being smart was cool. This was no nerd farm where students were sent off into basement labs to work on experiments or translate Cicero ten hours a day. The Prep’s message was more akin to “you’re here, you’re smart, you actually might be cool.” Coming of age in an environment that was supportive of nerdiness was far better than doing so in, for example, a large public high school that may or may not have existed solely to perpetuate stereotypes (jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, those weird kids that dress like vampires, abused kids, etc.), and it gave us confidence and allowed us geeks to flourish. At the Prep, we had good athletic teams and killer debate and chess teams. Our mixers, dances held a few times a year limited to Prep guys but open to girls from any high school, were always sold out and had a healthy girl-to-guy ratio—and we still had a higher proportion of virgins than any high school in the greater Philadelphia area.
So as you continue to read about nerds, please keep this in mind. We did not wear pocket protectors, but we did not go to NBA game
s with Justin Timberlake. We were something somewhere in the middle.
I still hung out often with my buddies from the neighborhood. After working at Mick-Daniel’s or on weekday evenings, I went to the Park to sit around, shoot the shit, and hope for a fight to break out on the basketball court. But during the week, I’d stay after school and hang out with my Prep friends, to sit around, shoot the shit, and hope for a fight to break out on the basketball court. Thus the double life: I wanted to keep one foot in the neighborhood because I loved my friends and had known them forever, but at the same time I really liked the people I’d met in high school. And if I wanted to keep hanging out with my high school peeps, it became clear that I’d need to tackle that rite of passage in every teen’s life: getting a driver’s license.
While most teens look at a driver’s license as a major step toward freedom and independence from the shackles of their parents’ rule, as far as I was concerned . . . meh. Yes, having a license would allow me to travel of my own volition, which would be nice. But then I’d actually have to drive.
Most of my friends from high school lived in the suburbs west and northwest of the city. Under the current system, I got out to the burbs because my friends Kyle and Flem, who had already gotten their licenses and lived in New Jersey, would drive me. My house was practically on the way out to the suburbs, so they’d pick me up when we’d go out for a night of ordering a pizza and watching a movie in a friend’s basement and hoping to God that Renée Garrity was wearing a shirt that showed some cleavage.
But Kyle and Flem wouldn’t drive my ass around forever. When my time came, it was expected that I’d get my license and then join the rotation. I had very, very little interest in this. I liked things the way they were: Kyle or Flem would pick me up, and I’d sit in the back seat and make music suggestions or just look out the window while one of them drove and the other tried to navigate (this was before GPS, and we were fifteen-and sixteen-year-old kids driving around in unfamiliar areas) while I said things like “I really don’t think this looks like the right way” and “Can we, like, stop for a soda or something?” and “No, but seriously, I don’t think this looks like the right way.” Why change a good thing?
Furthermore, in the other part of my life, I really didn’t need a car. In the neighborhood, I could walk everywhere—to friends’ houses, food joints, music stores, and South Street, Philly’s counterculture center, with all its stores and people-watching. Growing up and living in the city meant that everything I needed to survive and thrive was no more than a walk away.
Then there was learning how to drive a car. As someone who couldn’t ride a bike until he was nine (by that point, it was either learn or give up, since there were no training wheels strong enough to hold me) or swim until he was eleven (though I could wade without drowning from a young age), I was not looking forward to the process of learning how to drive. Instead of falling off your bike or having to doggie-paddle furiously to the side of the pool, if you fuck up when you’re driving a car, you die in a fiery crunch of tons of metal.
Yet still, I am American, and in America, young boys are conditioned to want to get behind the wheel of an automobile and drive off, away from the restrictions of their parents and their town, free to be the person they want to be, to conquer the open road—all that crap. So a few months before my sixteenth birthday, as soon as I was eligible, I went to the DMV testing station in Southwest Philly to get my learner’s permit. It was a dank, hopeless place, filled with parents and pimply-faced teens nervous about taking the permit test. I had been studying the booklet, but I was a bit nervous, too. I could not have been less interested in the rules and regulations of the road in Pennsylvania, so the information didn’t stick easily. My name was called, and I was seated before a computer. After a few questions, I had my permit. Now I was ready to hit the road.
My Aunt Maureen and Uncle John surprised me with an early sixteenth birthday present: lessons with an instructor at a proper driving school. It was a relief, really. Not a small portion of my stress was related to who would teach me to drive. My mom was too high-strung; our only test drive had lasted all of one block, when she forced me to switch spots with her at the stop sign at the end of our street. My dad was at the opposite end of the spectrum and very laid back, but that didn’t make the idea of learning to drive with him any better. He was a mechanic and devout car worshipper, and I couldn’t imagine getting in the driver’s seat while he sat in the passenger seat; it’d be like Johnny Unitas showing the proper way to throw a football to his son, whose only ambition in life was to work in clays.
The task of teaching me how to drive fell to Angelo the Driving Instructor, which is what his business card said. Angelo was less driving instructor than life coach. Whereas most kids learning to drive did so with a parent sitting next to them either yelling, crying, or pulling out clumps of their hair, Angelo was calm as could be (probably because he had a brake on his side of his specially designed driving-school car). His philosophy on driving was to instill confidence in the student: learn the basics, and you got it. “It’s as easy as riding a bike,” Angelo would say, unaware that if this was the case, we might have a problem.
Yet it worked. I found driving easier than riding a bike, because, unlike my parents and the various aunts and uncles who tried to teach me to ride a bike, Angelo was disappointment-proof. Stop in the middle of the street to wave a jaywalking pedestrian across the road? No biggie, but we shouldn’t do that in the future. Let out a little yelp the first time on the highway? Hey, that’s fine. Proceed to drive on the highway in the right lane with the hazard lights on the entire time because there’s no other way you can handle it? Of course you can handle highway driving—but we’ll get ’em next time.
The Saturday after my sixteenth birthday, Angelo and I had an appointment at the same DMV at which I got my learner’s permit, but this time, it was for the real deal. Angelo peppered me with his usual confidence boosters as we drove there.
“Think about it, Jase. Do you know how many people drive a car every day? Millions! And do you know how many idiots they give licenses to? Millions!” Angelo smacked the dashboard as he drove and delivered this inspirational speech. When he showed up that morning, I assumed I would drive to the DMV center; a sort of test before the test, it would require the most highway driving we’d done and to an area of the city with which I was unfamiliar. But when he picked me up, he motioned to the passenger seat, telling me that he’d drive so I could relax.
I knew the most difficult part of the whole driving exam would happen right away: the parallel parking test. Angelo explained that they did this first to weed out applicants: conduct the hardest part first, and if the applicant fails, you don’t have to take him or her out on the road test.
Parking was the weakest part of my game, and if I so much as grazed any of the four orange cones, I would fail. But with Angelo’s assurances and him sitting next to me, I thought I could do it. (It didn’t hurt that the car I learned to park in was Angelo’s small Toyota Corolla, which we were now pulling into the DMV center.)
Angelo got out and was replaced by a DMV employee. Without looking at me or up from his clipboard, he said, “Pull up and park between the cones.” I tried not to think too much, remembering what Angelo had told me (“You know how many people parallel park every day all over the world? Millions!”). I pulled up to the designated spot, put the car in reverse, and backed up, turning the wheel right and then left to straighten out and gracefully sliding the car between the four orange cones. Just like that, before I could even think or worry about it, the hardest part of the test was now out of the way.
We were now onto the road test. You’d think some city planner would have realized that Colonial Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia was just about the worst place to put a DMV at which dozens of teenagers would be taking driving tests every day. Situated near a rail station, Colonial Avenue is a large thoroughfare perpetually clogged with traffic. It was almost as if the planning co
mmissioners said to themselves, “Which area in Philly would you say is most like Hong Kong? We’d like to pack that area full of teenage drivers with less than ten hours’ experience operating a car,” and shortly thereafter, ground was broken on the Colonial Avenue DMV.
We made a quick right out of the DMV and found our way to the quieter streets behind the center. I was careful to remember my turn signals, to keep my hands at ten and two, to come to a full stop, wait three seconds while looking left and right, and proceed. After a few spins around, I made a left onto Colonial Avenue on our way back to the station.
Colonial Avenue itself has six lanes, three going in each direction. When I made the left onto Colonial Avenue, I had the luxury of turning at a light, so all I had to do was wait for a green turn arrow. But as we were approaching the center, I’d have to make a left across three lanes of oncoming traffic, without a turn lane or light to guide me, in order to get back into the station.
After pulling onto Colonial Avenue, the center in sight, I was feeling good—like I would soon be a licensed individual—when something unexpected occurred. An ambulance, just behind me, turned on its lights and siren.
The car kept moving, but my brain stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I was in the leftmost lane, waiting to make that left back into the center. I knew that protocol was to pull over to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle got behind you, but I couldn’t do that: my left was coming up and I had two lanes of traffic to my right.
I slowed down. I panicked. I slowed down some more. The DMV official asked what I was doing. The ambulance was behind me, all noise and red flashing lights, right on my ass. I prepared to make the left into the center and slowed to a near stop. The ambulance felt like it was crawling into the trunk of the car, like the medics were turning up the volume of the sirens. The DMV official screamed, “Move!”
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 9