On one late February morning, I went outside to try to start my frozen Chevette and found the charred remains of a Valentine that I’d given to Angie, my on-again off-again flame that lived a half-hour south in Hermiston, Oregon. Apparently, she wasn’t happy about me spending time with Elvia, an ex-cheerleader with perfect brown skin, and one of the prettiest girls in our little Podunk region. They even worked together at a burger and shake joint called Arctic Circle. I had picked up Elvia there a few days before, not knowing that Angie was also on duty. I always thought they looked cute in their little paper hats and light blue polyester uniforms but maybe not so much on this particular day—Elvia looked panicked and sweaty and Angie looked pissed!

It was a complicated love triangle that wasn’t really a triangle. There were other people around—a couple dozen small town new wave/punk rock outcasts wearing stretch pants and safety pinned jackets, thumbing through the UK imports at the record store, drinking coffee (loads of cream and sugar) at the Shari’s restaurant and planning road trips across the state to Seattle (AKA: the city with actual dance clubs). People in my hometown dated, broke up, swapped partners, had one night stands, moved away, came back, and sometimes dumped their lovers to hook up with their younger siblings. So any love triangle in this scene was more like a Star of David (though I must admit I’m not sure if there were any Jews involved).

I wanted to be with Elvia, as much as any nineteen-year-old wants to be with anyone, but I also knew that 1. Angie and I had good dirty sex. 2. I’d probably move away soon. 3. Elvia’s adoptive parents didn’t want her to see me. 4.  Since Hermiston was a road trip, I didn’t get to see either of them very often. And 5. I was nineteen.

Regardless of what I wanted, Elvia would soon leave my life too. After I sent her money for an abortion, she disappeared for two months, eventually landing in Yakima, Washington with a new boyfriend I knew nothing about.

And Angie went away to college. So I tried to slut around a little, see who else would like me. I made out with girls who were sweet but scared, girls who were still virgins, and girls I had nothing in common with. I was too spastic and eager to love. My expectations broke my heart more than anything else. I was heart-shattered by my first girlfriend the year before and it was true that I still didn’t know what to do about it. Did I want revenge or rebirth? Did I want an unpredictable girl who fucked me in her hatchback in a graveyard or a sweet, shy Hispanic girl that I could make mixtapes for? I was awful at choices.

I spent a lot of time in my cramped mobile home bedroom, consoling in music that year. Or maybe I was torturing myself with it. The thing is: I wanted to feel bad. I wanted to cry. I wanted to feel like my emotional reservoir was deeper than the Columbia River. There was some great sad music coming out around 1987 and I wallowed in it. Two cassettes in particular were like my best friends, my metaphorical shoulders to cry on, my crutches, my therapy, my nurses.

They were: Welcome Home by ‘Til Tuesday and Idlewild by Everything But the Girl. In hindsight, I’m not sure if either of these albums was considered successful releases, but I sure loved them.

‘Til Tuesday was enjoying some buzz from their first album, a moody batch of sort of new wave songs highlighted by the big hit/title track, Voices Carry. But their 2^nd release was a daring departure, with some of the songs having a sad country kind of vibe. The song that really got me was track two, Coming Up Close.

I’ve always thought that lead singer Aimee Mann’s voice had a lot of depth, a ringing sadness that sometimes turned into a yearning moan. When she sang the lines, “There was a farmhouse that had long been deserted/We stopped and carved our hearts into the wooden surface” it brought to life one of my favorite sappy images of romance ever. I didn’t care that the song was set in Iowa or that they were listening to “a Dylan tape.” In my mind, Elvia and I were somewhere between Kennewick and Hermiston, maybe by the old schoolyard with the blanket taken out of the trunk of my car, listening to Aimee Mann sing to us. But the song soon gets sadder and sadder as it unfolds. When she sings, “Don’t you know that I can make a dream that’s barely half-awake come true?” it’s the kind of my-love-will-never-die statement that made my heart flutter and my eyes get wet. There are so many other killer lines throughout Welcome Home. In the song “On Sunday” Mann promises one of the sweetest gifts to her lovelorn listeners when she sings, “Why spend your sadness now?/Save it up for me/on Sunday/and why is lonely all you have?/when love is what you’ll find/on Sunday.”

Welcome Home fluctuates between comforting sweetness and terrible heartbreak. In “Have Mercy,” Mann kicks off the song stripped down and blunt. “He made me feel so second best/I never should have let him do it…” By the end of the song though, she’s become strong and sings, “Have mercy on him/the love that I had saved for him is gone.”

The album’s finale, “No One Is Watching You Now,” is sort of a sad kiss-off. Mann seems defiant the way she sings the last lines, “I know that sadness bleeds through/and my sadness for me/is now sadness for you/cause no one is watching you now/I know no one is watching you now/like I did.” And she holds out that last word, that last note, for emphasis.

Everything But the Girl, before they actually became popular for a while with their more club-friendly songs, weren’t very well-known in the United States. Maybe a little too British, a little too Morrissey-ish, a little too, I don’t know, soft?

But Idlewild is one beautiful album, full of romantic love, baby love, small town love, and unrequited love.

The languid beauty, “Shadow On a Harvest Moon,” is the kind of song that will crush your heart at any age.

When Tracey Thorn coos about a mutual lingering love that “stays alight and won’t be buried” and gets “brighter year by year” the yearning is palpable. Then she gets to the last line and sings, “I write these words to make them true/I’ve drowned my torch and so should you” she sings it three times, as if she really needs to convince herself.

Even though I listened to these songs over and over in the late 80s it had been a while since I heard them until I found a CD of Idlewild last year. I thought it might sound dated now, especially with some of the music’s more jazz-like influences on several tracks, but when I played it for my wife to get her take, she understood my affinity for the songs and especially Thorn’s amazing vocals. “She makes every song sound beautiful,” she said.

Beautiful is definitely one way to describe her voice and these songs. Evocative is another one. There are several moments on Idlewild where Thorn and/or her partner Ben Watt sing specifically about British things I wouldn’t have a clue about and yet these descriptions would still make me cry like a baby. In the song, “Oxford Street,” Thorn paints a sweet portrait of childhood with the lyrics, “When I was ten I thought my brother was God/he’d lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod/I learned the names of all his football team/and I still remembered them when I was nineteen.” In “Lonesome For a Place I Know” she sings about being in sunny and warm Italy but feeling the need to return to England.

There’s also a strong sense of loyalty and sweet wisdom that just oozes from these songs. It sometimes feels fierce, like when Thorn sings “It always will be/you and me against the world” in “I Always Was Your Girl.”

And sometimes it feels maternal, like in their memorable single, Apron Strings” (“When you cry I will be there/I’ll sing to you and comb your hair/all your troubles I will share.”) or the tender and wonderful song, These Early Days (“You’re only two and the whole wide world revolves around you/and nothing’s happened yet that you might ever wish to forget/It doesn’t stay that way/If I could I’d make it stay that way.”)

There is a special magic to song, albums, and artists like this. The best ones know that the most important connection to be made is from one heart to another heart. Without these two albums, my heart would have probably stayed broken for longer. I would have felt a little lost at sea—an emotionally turbulent sea. These songs helped me grow up. They helped me understand how a lover could burn a letter and put it under my windshield wiper. They helped me understand how to let go of lost love. They helped me to embrace honesty and hope. They helped my heart become stronger.

Kevin Sampsell is a bookstore employee in Portland, Oregon and the author of many books including the memoir, A Common Pornography (Harper Perennial).

B1 was mostly a lost cause for me in the way of figuring out her personality. I know now that she was a possible daddy’s girl and a child of divorce who, like almost all of the non-artist children of Midwest divorce I know, desired nothing much more than for life to be simple and steady. All I knew back then was how important it was for her to laugh at my jokes. If she seems to be a flat character in my life, it’s because, as I look back at her, I realize she only exists through my gaze. I myself was the sort of kid who couldn’t think of any really good ways to make people like me, so I said a lot of things in hopes of entertaining. When I was sent to talk to the guidance counselor about this, I asked him if he thought my friend A.J. was funnier than me.

We were children, but these elements of our core selves—the joker and the joke—remain unchanged.

B2 was beautiful and irreverent and, above all else, slippery. The girl I had dated in high school was all three of those things, but never more than one at a time, which became exceptionally confusing. The consistent B2 drove two hours every other weekend to come home and pull a couple short shifts scooping ice cream at the gas station we both worked at. She possessed many laudable traits—a knack for absurdity, a body built for landings—but also had the unfortunate character flaw of oversight, meaning that she didn’t mention that she had a boyfriend for the entire time I was trying to make it as obvious as I could, in two day intervals every two weeks, that I wanted to date her. This is the problem with Subtlety and the Single Man.
Still at a stage in my life when I was convinced that a declaration of love will do anything in the way of making up someone’s mind—as if a confession is the extra credit that turns a Fail into a Pass—the night I had made up my mind to do it happened to be the day I found out she was dating someone already. In the months that came after, B2’s boyfriend would demand and receive from her the passwords to her e-mail and voicemail, the changing of her phone number, a key to her apartment, and financial assistance in paying his child support. We obviously lost contact in the midst of all this. Part of me wished I would have known she was so insecure and the other part of me wished I had known that I wasn’t.

Sometime between those two girls, I heard Pavement’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain and Weezer’s Pinkerton on the same day and decided, as if choice had anything to do with it, that Pinkerton was the album. As I was falling for B1, both Pavement and Weezer were at the height of their relevancy, and by the time I was over B2 a dozen years later neither the bands nor the girls mattered beyond the ways in which nostalgia often does, foreclosure disguised as caution.

* * *

Pavement is the better band, probably. Their music is awkwardly endearing, oftentimes sounding, as a girlfriend of mine once described the music of Lifter Puller, like a bunch of punk rock kids playing circus music to impress their friends. The lyrics lack a similar social polish. Guitarist/vocalist Stephen Malkmus was the next logical step beyond Paul Westerberg in the evolution of middle-class boys expounding on their uneventful Anglo-Saxon lives. The self-awareness is sardonic enough to not run the risk of being pegged as too serious and the couplets were incredibly witty. Pavement’s charm was in their sad familiarity, the way they sounded like guys I knew—disheveled, unintentionally poetic, directionless—writing songs about guys like me. All too many of us knew what was meant by the line “You’re the kind of girl I like because you’re empty, and I’m empty.”

Weezer was one of the bands—and, when we consider that popular music of the early mid-90s was dominated by radio-friendly R&B and odd dance pop, perhaps the band—that people latched onto in the wake of grunge. Kurt Cobain got rid of his face and five months later “Buddy Holly” was opining the joys of platonic friendship and making lots of people forget about that large portion of their life they spent tying a long-sleeved flannel around their waste while telling mom and dad to go fuck themselves. The guitar solos on The Blue Album were like hair metal nerds auditioning for Cheap Trick, and with the controlled feedback that peppered the songs, there was enough of the past in the present to not scare away the zeitgeist: the pop of the 70s, the guitars of the 80s, and the shrugged-off passion of the 90s.

It was almost perfect when Weezer played David Letterman’s show that year and used the amps that were meant for The Cranberries performance the next night, because for awhile there they were the same band: “Zombie” was to Gen-X XXs who were mere LittleGrrrls when all the important shit was going on what “Say It Ain’t So” was to the young boys who stayed up to watch 120 Minutes with their older brother but never really understood or enjoyed it.

Then everything changed when Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo went crazy. He finished the tour for The Blue Album and enrolled in Harvard to get his English degree. He grew a beard and had surgery to correct the unevenness of the length of his legs. In addition to not just having to figure out how to be famous, he also had to figure out how to be not famous again now that nobody recognized him. Instead of the suicide and general destruction that cool musicians do when they lose their minds, Rivers exploded the way geeks like us are prone to do. He fell in love with a lesbian and snuck into a girl’s room to read her diary and had borderline sexual correspondence with a teenage Japanese girl. He wrote and recorded demos for a rock opera about space called Songs From the Black Hole and then scrapped almost all of it. The guitars got louder and more intricately layered. The bass and drums got turned way the fuck up. The feedback squelched and reverberated and then died, unceremoniously.

If Pavement’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain was guys I knew writing songs about guys like me, Weezer’s Pinkerton was a guy like me—a fan of wrestling and the X-Men who liked classic rock and girls but only felt comfortable around one of them—writing songs about me.

* * *

The situation was timeless: I teased B1 because that’s what young boys do when they’re idiots and she laughed because that’s what young girls do when boys are idiots. Though it was probably the last year in my life that it was somewhat acceptable to tie a girl’s shoes to her desk as a means of affection, I was as typically stubborn as I always have been, and I remained in that state of arrested development for the next six years, which is almost as long as it took me to get over B1.

Other boys my age were moving from light harassment to heavy petting and I wasn’t. In seventh grade my friend Jesse used the words “box,” “punani,” and “fingerbang” all within ten seconds of each other when describing his weekend and I knew I was behind on the game. Jesse’s explorations into sex were as interesting to me as they were foreign—it took me years to figure out what a punani is, and even now I had to Google it for the spelling—but I still thought of it as secondary, something more anatomical than sexual. It was as big as the difference between a police report regarding prostitution and the actual act being sold. My time during the entirety of the six or seven years I was in my version of love with B1 was spent thinking up scenarios in which I would luck into her affection—saving her from a gang of thugs, learning her favorite Aerosmith song on guitar, etc. This left little room for punani, imagined or otherwise.

The first line on Pinkerton is “I’m tired, so tired / I’m tired of having sex.” He’s making Jen. He’s making Gwen. He’s making Catherine. While it sounds like he’s sick of the rock star life of one girl one night and then another girl the next, it’s not really sex that Rivers is having. He’s actually just masturbating all the time, and he’s sick of it. He’s literally howling over it. The microphone distorts and the levels get wonky. But the rhythm section sounds like real sex, the big drums pounding and the bass sliding comically up and down like penetration. What’s going on isn’t a replacement for love, but love and sex are intertwined in such a way that there’s a minor essence of one in the other even when the counterpart in question is actually completely absent.

When I heard Pinkerton for the first time, the nineties were turning into the aughts and I had been jerking off pretty steadily for at least a few years. But the punani, it was still absent. It was even still barely even imaginary—it had nothing to do with B1 and hardly anything to do with Nikki Fritz and Maria Ford on Cinemax. This wasn’t good or bad. Or it was good and bad. Or it was good or bad. I didn’t know. But I wanted love to come true.
* * *

At the time of all the B1 and B2 goings-on, I hadn’t done anything of merit for any prolonged length of time. For this reason, my obsession with B1 became the defining idea of my life, the one thing I sustained for years and years and years—over a third of my life by the time it was all said and done. For as much as a clown as I was known for being, I was a very serious boy, and this was a very serious thing.

Whereas with B1 I had no idea what I was doing for the very valid reason of “I was between the ages of nine and sixteen and I was figuring things out, goddammit,” B2 came with a pedigree that I stamped on her myself. I hadn’t desired a girl since high school a year and a half prior, and when B2 came into the picture, I stopped even considering alternatives. At one point at this time during a party in college, some girl pulled her breasts out to show my friend Luke, and when I saw her do so, I walked away, already eerily proud of the new boundaries I already set for myself.

I was a single guy who had never been laid, turning away from a pair of bared breasts right in front of me, all because I was in love with a girl who didn’t even think of me as threatening enough to need to know she had a boyfriend.

The girl in the song “No Other One” has a tattoo and two pet snakes and she does drugs and she mysteriously ditches the dude to be with his friends in what one could assume would be a sexual manner. The way the song starts, almost revving up like Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart,” it’s easy to think of the girl as the badass—B1 and her KISS/Aerosmith tour t-shirt, B2 and her fishnet stockings when I took her to her first concert ever, GWAR/Alabama Thunderpussy—and the narrator—me with my Stone Cold Steve Austin necklace, me with my Corrosion of Conformity shirt—as the facsimile of that same unbreakable decadence.

Unlike the “No Other One” girl and Rivers, there was no addiction to comfort holding the Bs and I together. That’s why it was nice, so nice, to imagine all the problems—my buddy’s cocaine and Whitesnake shirt both stuck with sweat to my girl’s chest—and imagine us getting through it. And that was the real comfort: our love was passing tests so tangled up in fabrication that I didn’t even realize I was getting the answers correct only because I was writing the questions.

* * *

I think it was in the summer between fifth and sixth grade when I wrote B1 a letter and mailed it to her house. I had recently found my parents’ old typewriter and started writing on it. Not writing like the kind I do now, because being a writer wasn’t really something I had considered doing. That was the year we had to write our career goal on an index card and hang it up on the tack board behind our desks, and “writer” wasn’t even an idea I entertained for a moment. I wanted to be a professional wrestler—again, I must stress that I was a serious boy, and this was a serious thing. But what I wrote on the card was PSYCHOLGIST. All caps, no explanation. When we had to do the same thing a few years later, only this time in a business card format, I wrote “FAMOUS. RYAN WERNER: I’M FAMOUS.”

The summer I didn’t want to be a writer, I spent a chunk of time crafting a letter to B1. I wasn’t gutsy enough to commit to a full-blown confession—obviously, because if I was gutsy enough, I would have just asked her to go on a date with me in the first place—so, I settled for apologizing for making fun of her for being short, saying that I wouldn’t do it anymore.

That was the same summer her family merged with my friend A.J.’s family. (The same A.J. who I was concerned was funnier than I was.) The address I sent the letter to either left it open for interception by A.J. or B1 got it and showed it to him, perhaps wondering what it was all about.

I should point out now that the attachment of Pinkerton to B1 is mostly a retrospective process, whereas with B2 it was a pre-emptive process. When I heard the song “Why Bother?” I immediately knew that that summer was the one I should have walked away. “I’ve known a lot of girls before, what’s the harm in knowin’ one more? / Maybe we could even get together, maybe you could break my heart next summer.” And then the refrain, which is basically the title of the song with some expansion on the idea that all things that start will end, and all ends will be shitty.

B2 was the girl who I thought I should get next to because she had a look that made me think she was cool, so obviously I thought all along, through unfounded dedication and any other half-wit ideas I had, that I shouldn’t even bother with her. There’s that doubt, always. If there wasn’t, I would have just gone for her, everything else be damned.

And the letter? I don’t really want to talk about letters. There are days when“Across The Sea” is the only song about longing that matters. “Words and dreams and a million screams / Oh, how I need a hand in mine to feel.” For Rivers, it was the Japanese girl who wrote him a letter and wanted to know all about him and his hobbies and pretty soon he’s wondering what she’s wearing to school and how she decorates her room and how she masturbates. (“Why Bother?” also had a reference to jerking off, proving that, much like my life, masturbation is a running theme.) And that’s all an easy transfer from song-to-person: Rivers wants the girl and I understand his song about it because I want the girl, too.

Where it mutates for me is at the end of the chorus, when he sings, “I could never touch you, I think it would be wrong.” What would happen if I got what I wanted? Would I know what to do if I did profess my love and it worked? I’d spent so much time considering the endless possibilities of undefined losing that it became the most natural way for me to feel. It was better to have loved and never lost than to have never loved and lost it all.

* * *

The way memory works, and why it’s so faulty a device, is because it is built. When we remember something, it’s referred to as “recall,” when, in actuality, it should be “construct.” If, for instance, we recall speaking with a friend inside a coffee shop, we can probably remember what the conversation was about. Obviously word-for-word recall isn’t going to happen, but in constructing the scene in our head, what becomes of our friend’s shirt or the shirts of those in the surrounding area? The shirts we’re putting on them in our head is most likely not the shirts they were wearing. Yet, there are shirts.

I remember multiple times in my life where I do as the narrator in the song “The Good Life” does, looking into the mirror and not believing what I see. It’s my face staring back at my face, wondering what happened to my life and deciding that it was time to go back to shaking booty and making sweet love all the night—I want sugar in my tea, goddammit—but really it’s none of that, because I don’t think it ever actually happened. Any time in my life I’ve looked in a mirror, I thought only of the specific thing I was looking into the mirror for: facial blemish, symmetry of mustache, or, back when I was younger and dealing with B1, development of chest hair. But there it is in my memory, this repeated moment of lucidity happening over and over and over again.

Rivers sings in “El Scorcho” the most simple of ideas: “I’m a lot like you, so please, hello, I’m here, I’m waiting / I think I’d be good for you, and you, you’d be good for me.” The older I get and the more I try to fall in love and just can’t seem to do it anymore or, even worse, when I can, the more often I recognize that I was right about the lack of complication in real love. The mid-to-late point of the album where “The Good Life” and “El Scorcho” are found mirrored by my mid-to-late points of self-realization.

Every musical quirk of Pinkerton is represented in the vocal performance of “El Scorcho”: party rock gang shouts on the chorus, a vocal line doubling the guitar solo, a melody better suited for the bass line of a slow pop-soul jam. Glam metal was just as fun and just as stupid, but it was offensively so. Sonic Youth could be just as silly, but they often took themselves too seriously or dumbed down so much that it all felt like the sort of fake irony that would swallow the post-modern mindset in years to come. “El Scorcho” is the way a dorky kid shows that he cares a lot when he doesn’t have the budget for a parade and the only thing he can do is play guitar. It’s how I’ve approached my own rock and roll since hearing it: the most heartfelt bombast one can muster.

This bravado, especially with B1 and the ways children learn to flirt, led to the idea that maybe the girls wanted me to do what I wanted to do. Of all the ways Pinkerton was detrimental to my development as a person who knows how to properly love, or at least learn about love, the idea that I was close enough to do it right became the most dangerous aspect of the entire game.

“How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it, I gotta sing about it and make a record of my heart / How stupid is it? won’t you gimme a minute, just come up to me and say “hello” to my heart / How stupid is it? For all I know you want me, too, and maybe you just don’t know what to do / Or maybe you’re scared to say ‘I’m falling for you.’”

When a fabricated relationship gets to a point where “The Good Life” and “El Scorcho” become words of advice to be followed as if they were printed on the labels of medicine bottles, a game is the only thing love is. It became clear that Rivers, doubting as he may be, was not helping my situation.

* * *

Every time I said, “She’s the sort of girl I could see myself with in fifty years,” and it’s something I said about a few girls, it was a lie. I couldn’t even see myself in fifty years. B2 was the second girl I really thought I meant it about, which means it was a situation worse than the first time I thought it, as I assumed I had learned something and corrected my mistakes. Though it’s true that I did learn some things about love between the ages of sixteen and nineteen—don’t let someone get pissed at you for eating too many middle slices of square-cut pizza, don’t clap a girl’s breasts against one another just because they make a funny sound—the scale on which those things must be judged are so remedial that it would be like expecting a Gorilla that was taught sign language to be ready for a position as a stock broker.

The idea that I would not only settle down into domestic life, but get someone else to settle into it with me, seemed even more outrageous when I consider that B2 was, and is, unable to be domesticated. Controlled by a drug dealing obsessive? Sure. But domestic? Hardly. At the age of twenty she was feral and sought empty, sober joy harder than anyone I had ever met. She slept four hours a night and lived off sweets, Pepsi and ice cream and candy. Her energy scared me.

But somewhere in B2 there was a girl I thought I could see myself with in fifty years. She was the girl who covered up every part of a person’s face except their eyes when trying to remember who they were. She would go around to places I would go first in the morning when opening the gas station, drawers with coffee filters and soda fountain cups, and leave drawings of me eating beef brisket sandwiches. These were not domestic activities, but they were infinitely charming, and when Rivers sang about the pratfalls of his little ol’ three-chord self, it took a lot to admit that he was, indeed, falling for the girl, whoever the girl may be.

The combination of “Pink Triangle” and “Falling For You”—about trying to settle down with a girl who’s a lesbian and trying to settle down with a girl who is all-too willing to settle down, respectively—make for an interesting duplicity in the Pinkerton ethos. While Rivers is lamenting over the non-commitment of the lesbian, he has to practically force a proclamation from himself when considering his situation with the girl who he has a chance with.

We all know how lucky you are if the one you love is the one who loves you. What not everyone knows is how lucky you are if you love the one the one you love loves.

* * *

Here’s the short version: It can be lost, even if it isn’t yours to lose.

“I guess you’re as real as me, maybe I can live with that / Maybe I need fantasy, a life of chasing “butterfly.”

When Weezer’s comeback album came out in 2001, I put all three of their discs in my three disc changer and played them all in a row twice after school every day. When my family moved between the summer of my sophomore and junior years, and I was afraid of losing all chances with B1, I had one night left at the old house. I slept on the floor with a blanket and a pillow and the only thing I had left in the whole house was my three disc changer with all three Weezer albums in it.

But I’ve listened to Pinkerton the most. I’ve maybe even listened to it too much, because it’s there even when I don’t want it to be. The best times in my life are when I don’t really like it at all. I’m older now. I’m over halfway through my twenties and I haven’t loved a woman in years. My time now is spent staying busy and saying things like, “Pavement is the better band, probably,” because I vastly prefer those rare moments when I can forget about all the time I spent listening to Pinkerton, drowning out my lovesickness with volume, hopelessly wondering what boys and girls are like when they’re together.

Ryan Werner is a janitor from Wisconsin. He runs the music/literature project Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

A: Sorry. I’m high and writing and my joint was burning in the ashtray after I thought I put it out and I got distracted with that and the music in my headphones.

I finally popped the question:

me: How do you write with headphones on?

A: I write with headphones on like this: sometimes the music gets me in a way that I shut it out and become all emotional and I don’t hear anything and I remember things emotionally and it just all comes out of me. I’ve never said that to anybody. I tell you things about myself that I’ve never told anybody.

**

Over time, I slowly began to do the same thing. I don’t think I ever made the conscious decision or anything like, I’m going to try wearing headphones while I write–it was more of a natural progression. It may have started simply because music from computer speakers sounds like shit. It used to bother me so much that I would play music from a neighboring boombox or something.

Writing with headphones in Sandy, Oregon

For the past year,  in my opinion–I cannot draft anything of substance without headphones on my ears. I know a big part of this is psychological. Without my headphones, it’s as if I am writing with the door and the windows wide open, wearing nothing but a bra and underwear. When I put my headphones on it feels like going underwater with a life jacket: I am protected and safe and I can go into scary places and survive.

Two music-lover writer buds of mine took the time to give me their answers to the question:  How do you write with headphones on? Here’s what they said.

Chloe Caldwell: What brand of headphones do you use and can you talk a little bit about them and where you got them?

Gregory Sherl: I use the headphones that came with my iPod. They are falling apart; the rubber around earpiece is basically gone. They also feel very dirty even though I clean them often. I would like a pair of big headphones that cover my entire ear. That would be rad. If someone sends me those headphones, I will send you a copy of every book I publish for the next three years.

Michael Juliani: I used to use the shitty white iPod headphones but I just switched (over the summer) to some better over-the-ear black ones.  I was scared of making myself go deaf, and those little earbuds were really irritating my ears.  Plus I’ve heard the quality is so bad…I’m willing to listen to music in any form but I’d prefer to hear it as close as possible to the way the artist hears it.

CC: What is your writing schedule like and do you write with the door open or closed and what percent out of 100 during your writing time are you wearing headphones?

GS: Probably 72% of the time I am wearing headphones while writing. The door is always open because I am usually in a public space (like a coffee shop or a bar that is only kind of a bar) or in my family room, and there aren’t any doors in my family room, just a couch and a chair that matches the couch and a TV and a cat and a table I sit at with a swivel chair that I sit on.

Il est Gregory Sherl

MJ: I enjoy having a sense that I’m maintaining a level of focused solitude while among other people.  I write a lot in public spaces like the library reading room or in the lobby of a building or at a lunch table with music going in my headphones.  I almost always have to be listening to music in order to enhance the trance, building up the tension of the energy I’m trying to press into for words.  When I’m writing at home in my apartment at my desk I usually keep the door closed and I’ll listen to my headphones really loud, but I don’t usually write as well in that situation.  I tend to be forcing things a bit more.  I purposefully disorganize my habits in order to get more spontaneous results so that’s when I decide not to listen to headphones, trying to pick up on all the things my senses are picking up around me.  I might keep the door open in that situation too.  I write everyday so I have to keep tricking myself in order to stay fresh (though the best work always comes when I’m not expecting it to, like after a ride in a car with loud music and a friend or having a new thought in my head on my way home from class or the library or something).

CC: What was the last song you listened to more than a couple of times through your headphones while writing?

GS: “Airplanes” by Local Natives. This question made me nervous because I feel like you are judging this choice. Tell me not to be nervous.

CC: Don’t be nervous. The weird thing about writing, I find, with music, is that sometimes it’s songs that you wouldn’t expect, that ”do it” for you while writing. You know?

GS: Is this a question? Either way I am nodding.

MJ: I think it was probably something Townes Van Zandt.  Probably Rake” by Townes Van Zandt.
The songs I end up listening to repeatedly while writing have a personality that elaborates on the personality of something I want to write.  Music helps me better understand what I’m trying to say about myself.

CC: What is a song that you listen to often while writing that surprises you?

MJ: At the end of the summer my life changed a lot and I felt like I needed to step away from certain things that would feel too “old-world.”  I listened to my sister’s iPod (when I was listening to music) and all she has is shitty pop music.  I don’t know that I was writing while listening to any of it, but I needed to clean myself out a bit by embracing a culture that I felt was bringing me some pain.  ”Embrace and love the things you fear.”  You’ve probably heard that before, right?  I guess that sometimes the music I listen to has a contradictory energy on face level to the kind of writing I’m doing with it but I don’t really notice it because my feelings are lined up all the same way during that space of time.

CC: Do you use headphones for anything else, like when you are walking/exercising/cooking?

GS: My only form of exercise is walking late at night, and I always have my headphones on when I do it. Everything I cook myself goes in the microwave so that would only be like what, 1.6 songs a meal? When I walk, I walk for a long time though — like two hours, so I get through a lot of songs. Usually I have an album or two of the week, and I just listen to those two albums throughout the week.

CC: Can you talk a little bit about the difference in mood when you decide to listen to music while writing vs. silence? Is this something you think about? Is this a big difference to you? Can you ever not decide what music to listen to and not been able to write until you figured it out? Do you use music as a tool when writing, to become sad for a sad piece and to feel joy for others?

GS: Oh I never write in complete silence. I used to only write in public because I hated silence so much. I liked to listen to rhythm of people talking; I used to say it helped with dialogue. That’s probably bullshit but it sounded good to say when I was twenty. But no, never no music unless I am watching X-Files on Netflix. Sometimes Dana Scully’s voice is greater than music.

There are days when I can’t start a sentence until I have picked a song and sometimes it takes longer than I’d like to admit to pick a song.

The music I listen to during a writing session acts as a catalyst for what I’m writing. That might not be true but it feels that way. It’s probably a subconscious thing; I most likely pick the music based on what I’m feeling, which is what I’m about to write anyway, instead of the other way around.

Michael Juliani

MJ: I don’t always need music in order to write, and sometimes I deliberately avoid it because I feel too cramped and focused on what the song is saying rather than what my subconscious is unfolding.  When I’m working really well I won’t consciously be hearing the song that’s playing in my headphones.  It’s almost like I’m not listening to anything but my own thoughts, and that the music is helping me to carry on that kind of mood.  A song will end and I wouldn’t have noticed anything since it began.  Or I’ll be listening to a whole album and when I come out of my trance I’ll have gone through 3/4 of it without noticing.  When I get too obsessed with the music, though, I’m not able to write well and I get really frustrated.  I try to stay away from those situations but I listen to so much music all the time (when I’m walking, driving, sitting around, thinking, etc.) that it gets to be too much at a certain point and I can’t even think straight.  That’s the worst writer’s block.  Music does a lot of things to me emotionally that it’s bound to go haywire once in awhile.  For instance, now I’m listening to much less music because I’m trying to learn more about the music of poetry, really focusing on how I manage line breaks and listening to the subtleties in other poets’ work, speaking it out loud and seeing how it flows so well.  In short, when music is doing good things for me it helps with my meditation, but when I’m feeling overwrought with it I have to take it away in order to achieve meditation.

CC: Okay–being so interested in words and writing them and simultaneously listening to them, I always thought the song lyrics would distract me but they almost never do. You?

GS: No, the lyrics never distract me. If anything, they make me work harder. I hear a killer lyric, and it just makes me want to write something better than that lyric. That doesn’t happen, but it’s nice to have something to work towards. Football is on TV, and my dad just said, It’s snowing in Buffalo. That would be a good lyric. It made me want to write something better than that. Or maybe I’ll just steal it, because my dad isn’t famous.

MJ: Only in the sense that I’d view certain lyricists as poets, or that I view their words with the same appreciation and level of inspiration as I would a writer’s words. Bob Dylan’s obviously one of those people whose words are like that.  Cobain, Van Zandt, Eminem…they all have lyrical power that informs my writing.  Other music just creates moods and landscapes that I appreciate and adapt to my own use.  For awhile I was writing things that satisfied the feelings I had listening to my favorite music.  The Mars Volta write songs based on how closely they can match the feelings they get from their favorite movie scenes.  I tried to apply that to poems and even essays.

CC: What would you say are some songs you listened to a lot while writing I Have Touched You? The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail? Heavy Petting?

GS: I went through a heavy Das Racist phase. I am trying to think during which book that phase was. You can usually find lyrics littered through my books. I always say “A song goes…” and then there are some lyrics, and it’s usually from a song I am listening to at the moment. Actually, the Das Racist might be from Monogamy Songs, which you didn’t actually ask about. Shit. You are asking me about too many books. I listen to a lot of Modest Mouse always, and I know I went through a lot of Building Nothing Out of Something while writing I Have Touched You. I am currently expanding I Have Touched You into a novel length collection of linked stories, and I’ve been listening to Yuck on repeat through that. And The National. Kanye West, too. I am always listening to some Kanye West, too. He is a great person to quote.

CC: I agree. I used to work at the Gap and so did Kanye and while I folded jeans I would quote “Spaceship”
to myself and in my head I would sing:

In the mall till twelve, when my schedule said nine, puttin’ them pants on shelves very patiently I ask myself, where I wanna go, where I wanna be, life is much more than running in the streets.

Thank you for your time.

GS: Thank you for asking me.

MJ: Loved doing this.

Gregory Sherl is the author of Heavy Petting (YesYes Books, 2011), The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail (MLP, 2012), the chapbook Last Night Was Worth Talking About (NAP, 2012), and Monogamy Songs (Future Tense Books, 2012). He blogs/reviews/interviews athttp://gregorysherlisgregorysherl.com/ and can be reached at jesuis.gregory@gmail.com.

Michael Juliani was born and raised by Greeks in Pasadena, California.  He turns 21 in May.  His column, “From Young Rooms,” runs on Neon Tommy.  He’s a junior at USC’s journalism school.  Email him here: juliani@usc.edu.  Read him here: michaeljuliani.wordpress.com.

1) The Guilty Writer

In “On Tour with Zykos” by Okkervil River, Will Sheff sings: I go home, take off clothes, smoke a bowl, watch a whole TV movie. I was supposed to be writing, the most beautiful poems, and completely revealing divine mysteries up-close, I can’t say that I’m feeling all that much at all, at twenty seven years old, I’m disgust with the desire by the guys that conspire at the only decent bar in town. And they drink MGDs and they wish they had me like I wish I had fire. What a sad way to be.

2) The Ambitious Writer

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman sounds like he needed to get out of New York City so that he could get his shit done:

I’m at the end. This here my rope. Another year, to write and read the book I wrote. I leave New York, for other cities, which let me play with gas and fire.

3) The Struggling Writer.

In her song 24, Emmy The Great tells her lover: First we were born and we slowly ran out of luck, you are still not Charles Bukowski and I am not Diane Cluck. I would marry you money but I don’t think that you’ll ever have enough.

I love how Emmy The Great references Diane Cluck like that, in an almost self-deprecating way. And for anyone that has ever dated someone that thought they were Bukowski, well, there you go.

Right now I’m sitting in the reading room of a gothic university library listening to the album’s title track.  I used to come here like I was looking to buy the place—twice, three times a day: all the times the halls filled with people coming home from classes, proffering bongs from behind their sock drawers.  Their presence reminded me to pressure myself.  I was in the market to make myself a new person.

My spot’s at a table that pinpoints an exact right angle to the two most beautiful young women in the room.  One of the girl’s wearing white, the other black.  The one in black looked kinder than the one in white until she put her hair up.  They both seem to have a few layers of anxiety, maybe insecurity, the kind that doesn’t matter to attraction.

When they remaster old classic records it means they go back in and make them sound louder.  They know what the people want.  The blues to make us all feel unified in our old souls.  Rap to turn pain into a resume.  I woke wanting music to make my life a movie.  I had weak sweat all over my face.  The girl woke up alone in covers, naked like an aching wife, wanting and hating me at the same time.  Two nights ago I broke her heart (she’d probably linger on that statement…I’d say you just really disappointed me…) so I’m feeling about ready to leave town in a whirl of dust and calm sounds.  Halloween night we were on her bed where she’d usually let her incense and speakers drain over us—she called any classic song a “throwback.”  It felt dangerous arguing about what she expected and what I wanted when we were still under the same covers—I tried to decide the best time to get up and put on my jeans and boots, somewhere before her pained expression would turn to tears.

She’d heard, during our gray togetherness, half of what she wanted to hear.  She allowed herself that.  The other half I confused her with.  I imagined our lives as rivers, so like with songs the ends (the whole feeling) could justify the means, the waters would roil over the rocks.  As is true for whenever I’m acting in my best interests, I sounded completely full of shit.

We owe each other CDs.  When our heads had been suctioned together by our moist faces, my nerves in another place, I’d said that I’d make one for her if she’d hand over the free copy of the new Chili Peppers she got from the newspaper office.  I rifled through the lyrics with a smile on my face while she was in the bathroom—And Mary wants to build it up, and Sherri wants to tear it all back down, girl. I’m never going to get that CD from her.

I keep sleeping through my alarm, shaken finally awake by sounds of machinery and labor protestors.  “Shame!  Shame!” they chant, disturbing the atmosphere and appearing insane.  It makes me feel like the whole day’s over, like I’ve wasted my life.  The food trucks lining the street look, smell, and sound like my discomfort.

The girl in white could be an athlete, by which I mean she has water at her place and her legs look stronger than mine.  She’s chewing gum like a cow, totally focused and wearing pearl earrings.  With her firm wrist she circles some important words.

My mouth, from lunch, has a metallic deli taste.  I know the girl in black put her hair up because work’s more important to her than anything, accounting books splayed out like maps.  Her neck is an amber tan.  I want to see her in her regular clothes.  Even someone like Rilke said art and sex are the most similar things.  Lots of people would throw religion in there too but that’s not for me.  God speaks to me when the other two things are working.

I’m afraid of someday going deaf.  Wherever I’ve lived I’ve needed headphones because there’s no way of sharing yourself with people like that without being selfish.  The doctor, after I asked if I should worry about my ears, drew calculus on the paper mat next to where I was sitting—the jagged ups and downs to me could’ve referred to anything human.  “This is why doctors need to learn calculus,” he said.  “For questions like this.”

Since I turned thirteen I’ve listened to music to learn myself.  When I set it aside for a couple days I become a turned-off television.  I’ve never fought another man, but if I do (it seems like it has to happen) I think I’ll need a tune going to keep an anger fresh.

The weather in California gives older women the opportunity to dress how they want to feel.  The oldest person I’ve ever been with turned 20 six months before I turned 19.  She thought Roger Daltrey still looked sexy.  Her dad took her to see his shows whenever Daltrey came through town, which during our quick relationship seemed to be about twice.

Her father had lost his job, they went on the mother’s money.  She asked me to go with them to reciprocate for a concert I’d taken her to.  I didn’t want to feel like I was that together with her.  It wasn’t that kind of thing, but it was still serious.  In other words, I didn’t want my parents to know about her so I kept things private.  I spent everyday in her living room—hers was the only place I watched TV for almost two weather seasons.  I did all my wandering on her couch, her floor, her balcony.  Some nights I’d watch the street at four a.m., seemingly trying to freeze myself in the aquatic blue cold.

One day she took me to her favorite place on campus, a building that doesn’t exist anymore.  Now its foundations are beneath all that noise that wakes me in the afternoons.  It belonged to the School of Music, a place for students to sit in glass rooms that numbed out sound.  Any of the singers could be screaming, or just opening their mouths.

She took her white wool gloves off (this was winter) and put them across the top of the piano so it looked like a performance was coming.  She admitted that she didn’t really belong with an instrument anymore (her bass cleft tattoo happened in high school).  I demanded to know the name of the song she started to play.  My notebook in my lap, I’d wanted to write a poem along with her haltering music—I wanted to improvise like with jazz.  She claimed the song to be the easiest thing in the world to play, that anyone who had ever taken lessons knew how to play a version of it, but that she had never learned its name.  I think I made a disgusted face.

Since then I’ve listened to it plenty of times, it’s Beethoven, “Moonlight Sonata.”  After I had to leave her that January—with a phone call I really couldn’t answer—I needed to know that I’d gained something.  The flood had come through.  I needed the name of that song.

In the present, I’ve had to press myself to remember that.  The girl in white isn’t wearing jewelry on her wrists, a detail I admire.  The song on now reminds me of whiskey.  Blonde hair reminds me of whiskey.  The two of them together remind me of a feeling.  It’s the young man’s American Dream—the point we’re driving towards to learn once again that we’re all false prophets until we truly, somehow, fall in love, maybe, hopefully.  The girl in black has in black earbuds.  A blonde in black could make me leave home—her skin, hair, and teeth pop and shine in contrast.  We stared at each other for just a moment.  Only I thought it was staring, I can tell.  She’s started to leave, wearing rainproof boots all the women wear now when the temperature drops.  Her walking’s truly something that can’t be stopped, and why try…I haven’t the slightest clue what her name or nickname is.  “Hey Girl in Black!  Don’t leave me, honey!”

Music to me seems like the only way to scream and cry in public and get people to love you for it.  So I have the question all the time in my mind: Why aren’t you trying to make music?

Michael Juliani is a writer from Los Angeles, 20 years old, brown hair, brown eyes.  His column “From Young Rooms” runs on Neon Tommy. He’s a junior at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC, studying Print & Digital Journalism.  You can email him here: juliani@usc.edu. His blog is here: michaeljuliani.wordpress.com

We all have albums that are like mile markers. Albums that, when we hear them, send our memories into overdrive and remind us of who we have been, what we have seen, and who has been around. Some albums can remind you of someone you used to love, someone you used to want to spend every waking moment with. Some albums can remind you of trying not to fall asleep at the wheel and cross the median in the middle of the night cutting through Kentucky on your way to do the hardest shit you will ever have to do as a living human being.—Sean H. Doyle

Music has always felt like a toy to me. As a kid, I liked to record songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. Then I would masturbate and coincide my climax with either my favorite lyric or the song’s climax. As an adult, I liked to do the same thing, but with a human.

2007: My first and most memorable sexual music obsession was with For Emma Forever Ago by Bon Iver. The way that CD ended up in my Brooklyn apartment was a mini miracle. My roommate worked at the Strand bookstore, and an elderly and mentally disabled man befriended her. He liked her silver necklace and told her he would trade her a CD for it. She came home from work with a gold CD and scrawled on it was Bon Iver, For Emma Forever Ago. It was barely legible. In the morning, Noelle put it into the Discman, which was hooked up to our loud and expensive speakers. The first song started to play. We looked at one other and simultaneously shrugged and sort of nodded, a silent agreement that we both liked it. We thought it was pretty good. Pretty good turned into pretty great and 2007 turned into 2008 and the CD had taken up permanent space in the Discman. I had it all queued up to begin when this guy that I was interested in came over. Let’s call him B. B. sat at the table and started rolling a joint, and then I watched his body respond to the music. He moved his leg up and down, nodded his head, moved his shoulders. He asked me what it was. That’s when I knew I would love him.

We didn’t know how much that CD would define us. Years later, when we’d be in a different apartment in a different bed with a different computer and a song from that album would randomly come on Pandora or Last FM, he would say, “We even have our old soundtrack playing!” Or I’d get text messages like, “Fuck you Bon Iver! I want you.” I truly feel like that CD is now a living thing in both of our lives, like a plant. Sometimes we water it, sometimes we don’t. Talk all the shit in the world you want to about Bon Iver. When it is playing loudly in your first Brooklyn apartment that would soon be condemned and the season is changing from Winter to Spring and you are falling in love, there is no more beautiful album. When I snooped through B.’s journal once, I saw that he wrote that “Skinny Love” was the soundtrack to our affair.

2008: Summer came and I was drunk more often than I would like to admit. I regressed and thought it would fun be to start to listen Everclear again. A lot of times I’ll do something as a joke, only to realize that even though it’s a joke to me, I’m still actually doing it. Liking it. What happened was that I found my old CD case and I was subletting a little bedroom, furnished with things all bought from Ikea. There was a boom box in there. Everclear made me feel youthful and cracked me up. B. would come over and we’d drink liquor on ice during the day, and he’d say, “Do we really have to listen to Everclear?” I liked the fact that Everclear annoyed him. He humored me though.“Have you ever had sex while listening to Everclear with anyone else?” I’d ask him. “No,” he’d say, pulling me closer. Good, I’d think in my head. We were both writers and I liked to think of him writing sentences like, “One summer I dated a girl who listened solely to Everclear.”

My two favorite songs to have sex to were: “White Men In Black Suits” off of So Much For The Afterglow: All I want to do is lose myself in your room/all she wants is just a slow fuck in the afternoon. And “My Sexual Life” off of Sparkle And Fade. I more or less listened to that one on repeat. She gets tired of all the stupid boys/She can’t wait until they’re done/She wants a man who can take his time/She wants someone who can make her come/Yeah, can you make me come? “She makes me listen to Everclear while we’re fucking,” he would tell my friends, over beers, amused, shaking his head.

2009: Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion came out in January and by the time spring rolled around I was enthralled with it. My boss saw me walking around New York City holding a Discman and was embarrassed for me so she gave me her teenage son’s outdated iShuffle. I remember stumbling into B.’s apartment on my twenty-second birthday in an inebriated horny rage and bitching about how my headphones were old and tangled and how I had no money for new ones. “You think I didn’t used to have headphones like this! You think I was never poor!” he yelled back. Sometimes my iShuffle died and we’d put his Mac on the bed and plug into that. It is funny being plugged into a big silver box while orgasming. For a while, I thought I couldn’t orgasm without music. “Bluish” and “In The Flowers” were my absolute favorite songs on that CD. ”Put on that song that makes it feel like we’re underwater,” he would say, referring to the song “Bluish.” Sometimes we’d smoke and then look up lyrics online. “When I get high I want to fuck,” he’d say, “But when you get high you just want to look up lyrics all night.” Bluish is one of the most romantic Animal Collective songs, in my opinion. It’s so romantic that it hurts: Put on the dress that I like/Makes me so crazy though I can’t say why/Keep on your stockings for a while/Some kind of magic in the way you’re lying there.

2010: I began my fetish with Fever Ray, lead singer of the better-known band, The Knife. “What is this new age shit you’re listening to these days?” B asked me. I’d just sing along. When I grow up/I want to be a forester/Run through the moss in high heels/That’s what I’ll do

2011: We were at the ocean and after drinking tequila in the afternoon well into the evening we sat in the living room, by the woodstove, on our knees. We were on the computer looking up the lyrics to  “Don’t Haunt This Place” by The Rural Alberta Advantage. “Let’s sing it together,” B. said to me, “You be the girl, I’ll be the guy.” And so we did–with any humility we might have experienced, blinded by the tequila. It was one of the most tender moments we’ve ever had. My friend was there, and in the morning on the drive home, she said: “I almost cried when you guys were singing last night. I almost cried.”

In the L Magazine, Hannah Miet wrote:

Most striking is the album’s single, “Don’t Haunt This Place.” Amy Cole, who plays a ridiculous amount of instruments on the album—everything from a tambourine to a glockenspiel–adds her vocal harmony to the refrain, “because we need this oh so bad, because I need you oh so bad,” making it even more (oh so) emotional. If you drink while listening to this album, you might want to throw your phone out the window. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a nostalgia-fueled drunk dial, and if there’s any album that will send your heart shattering back ten years, Hometowns is the one to do it. Pass the tissues, please.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons, that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.

My essay “Long May You Run” is about different men I’ve loved born in the month of May. While writing it, I was looking some stuff up about May, Geminis, and songs about May. I discovered this Neil Young song I’d never heard and thought it was perfect. One website wanted to change the title to “May Numbers” but I didn’t feel as comfortable with that.

Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.

My book, (forthcoming in 2012) is titled, “Legs Get Led Astray” which is a snippet from a bunch of lyrics I like in Okkervil River’s song “Last Love Song For Now.” It’s off their album Black Sheep Boy Appendix. I originally played around with the title “Diaries Get Found and Opened” but my dad told me it was too long.  I thought about using “Lambs Out Wandering,” but I thought it was too boring. When “Legs Get Led Astray” popped into my head I knew it was the one.

I am going to bring home tea and lemons all the way from China. I will feed people these things. No oranges. No need. They are too heavy whole and I like California oranges. I like tangerines.

The tea man and his smile are not poisoned and are not hearing Suzanne. Maybe they are. How could they not be? Everything consumable in China is tinged with poison. Oh, melamine, oh protein adulteration. I love the yogurt here though, and sometimes it comes with a Pokemon spoon. Perhaps he’s a vegan. His smile is not poison. At the moment of the smile flash, it is not. My hands hovered over lemons just that hue. Now my hands are flirting with a small tea cup. Now my hands are on statue of Buddha. Now my hands drop a small plastic bag full of egg tarts. The man still smiles yellow nicotine and tea. Why is he so nice? I’m touching everything I see like a child. Don’t touch, don’t touch. Touching it all like it will heal my inherent moribundity. The tea shop is tiny and full of tea and tea accessories. His wife sits in the back at a laptop, typing madly from between giant headphones. She never looks up at us. I wonder if she ever looks up at all.

Camellia sinensis. Tea, all the tea. Not for all the tea. Michelle Tea. Green, black, white, flower. Herbal, medicinal. Ceremony. I don’t need tea but I want souvenirs and I want to go home. Not just to the hotel, but all the way home. All the way to America home. I’m ready. It’s time. My plane departs tomorrow, March 7. The day before my birthday. The Eve of International Women’s Day.

The tea man puts out one cigarette and lights his next. Each to next, each to next. For all the tobacco. Such yellow teeth you have, kind tea shop man. I have no Chinese beyond ni hao and xie xie. Hello, thank you. Hello, thank you.  I’m that sort of traveller. Language makes me shy. I’d be the worst kind of immigrant, speaking the native tongue only in the most dire of circumstance.

For the plant genus, see Nicotiana. For the American electronic musician, see Tobacco (musician). Not to be confused with Tabacco.

I have nothing to do now but pick the dropped egg tarts up and smile back. I want to buy some tea and leave now. I want to go home and shower. We took off into the city early, unshowered and unburdened but are coming back with sacks and sacks of treasure, wearing layers of Shanghai as second skin. City filth is skin and cars and dust and germs and oily residue on the hair. Now he beckons. Now we go to sit, glancing at each other, wondering if this is a tea ceremony scam. We sit on carved wood stools.

Both of us, always wondering if everything is a scam. We are from Shanghai and Las Vegas. We are of grifted universes, where everyone’s a shyster on the lam, and everything always is something of which to be wary.

We sit though, and the man pours us tea. Without mutual language, and with only hand gestures and smiles, he teaches me to make tea with a tiny cup and tinier cups and a lid, straining and straining, and he pours hot water over the tea and sloppily over his wooden table which is ornately carved like a tree covered in lore and mythology. The table has drains. He splashes his hands sometimes. He never winces at the heat. He gives us tea and tea. Not all the tea in China but all the tea we can fathom drinking again for the rest of our cynical lives. He gives us his cigarettes to smoke. He smokes more than he breathes. He won’t take ours in return. Ours are of higher quality but people do settle into brands, don’t they? An hour later, I am hovering over the shopkeeper’s tea bins again, over the dishes. We try to give him money for the ceremony and he won’t take it. It was a strange gift in a side alley in China, like so much is a strange gift. No grift. If not a gift, a gift with purchase. A sales technique. A small grift, perhaps, but a nice one. Sometimes it feels good to be taken a little. That’s the reason people fall.

We leave the tea shop, poison lemon and tea-laden, and I miss my plane the next day. Bad dumplings. Poison. Dirty oil, perhaps. I’m sure it’s not the tea. Tea can’t make you this sick. Right? We are sick. We nearly die. I hold tight to the Chinese plumbing fixtures, sure they will save me from my own mortality. I leave the hotel on March 8, my birthday. International Women’s Day. In China, women traditionally get this day off. In the US, not many realize it’s a holiday at all. I’m light as air, dehydrated, and weaker than watered down tea. I’m saying goodbye, half crazy. I travel blind, lemons and tea, lemons and tea. Tired nearly to sleep, I look down at the dark sea tickling the edge Asia and wonder if I see Jesus walking on the water; no. It’s a tanker full of tea or melamine or Barbie dolls with their perfect bodies. My seat mate, a Baptist preacher from Arizona, tells me we will be taking the long way to the layover in Seoul because North Korea is threatening to shoot planes out of the sky. I settle in, sleeping mask on, and cry. I take it off. I hold a mirror and wipe my eyes and lean back toward home, forever, until the next time, take a sleeping pill with some of the flight attendant’s lukewarm tea and I touch perfect unconsciousness with my mind.

Dena Rash Guzman in all her glory.

Dena Rash Guzman is a Las Vegas born author living on a farm near Portland, Oregon. She edits the online arts and literary journal www.unshodquills.com. She is currently at work on her first book, a compilation of China based short stories for Shanghai’s independent English language press, www.haliterature.com. She was named for Dean Martin. Writing is a solitary sport for her because it makes her smell bad.

We went into the house and he let me borrow his copy of XO. I loved it and would write down his words in my journals. Amity maybe wasn’t my most loved track on the album but it always stood out to me. It had an air of intensity and I was tickled by the word “Amity” and I liked how New York City was mentioned. I believed the song went like this for the first few lines:

Amity amity amity amity amity amity amity amity caught stars in her arms

Hello hello can you be happy in New York City amity walking like a lucky charm

I’m a neon sign and I stay open all the time…so let’s go, go go go go

I’m not sure if I was only hearing what I wanted to, (like Lisa Loeb) but I heard the “can you” pronounced like: “cue.” Like when we slur. “Mom, cue get me a popsicle?”

It pushed me onward. Could I be happy in New York City? Could I? I didn’t know. But I wanted to know. Elliott Smith was asking me. I wanted to be like Elliott Smith and write in my journal  at the bar Max Fish on the Lower East Side like my brother told me he did before he died. I wanted to be a neon sign that stayed open all the time. I truly thought that to myself when I fantasized about living in New York: I’ll be a neon sign that stays open all the time! I moved to the city a couple years later, some months after my twentieth birthday. Needless to say, my heart was crushed when I looked up the lyrics and saw that I’d been wrong all along. I’d altered the words.

I found that not only could I be happy in New York City, but I could be elated in New York City plus  a ton of other feelings I’d never felt before I moved there. I could be anything I wanted to be. At one point, I lived with my best friend. When she moved in, she showed up bearing a pink and white Hello Kitty toaster. It toasted Hello Kitty’s face into the bread but it was hard to master. She also brought Hello Kitty towel. I still have the towel here in my home, four years later, and use it often and I hold it dear to my heart.

The other Elliott Smith song I listened to often in New York was Bled White. It has an urgent energy to it. He sings, “So I wait for the F train,” and I only took the F train a dozen times or so while living in New York, but I never took it without singing that lyric in my mind or even putting it on my iPod while I stood on the platform, trying to maximize the moment, trying to give my life a literal soundtrack.

I’m a color reporter (rose city on the 409)
But the city’s been bled white (white city on the yellow line)
And the doctor orders (drinking ’til he’s trashed is just a waste of time)
He drinks all night to take away this curse
but it makes me feel much worse

Bled white

So I wait for the f-train (white city on the yellow line)
And connect through a friend of mine (white city to a friend of mine)
To a yesterdaydream (yesterday a dream was just a waste of time)
‘Cause I’ll have to be high to track the sunset down
And paint this paling town

Bled white

So here he comes with a blank expression
Especially for me ’cause he knows
I feel the same
‘Cause happy and sad come in quick succession
I’m never going to become
What you became

Don’t you dare disturb me (don’t complicate my piece of mind)
While I’m balancing my past (don’t complicate my piece of mind)
‘Cause you can’t help or hurt me (the anger, being mean was just a waste of time)
Like it already has, it may not seem quite right
But I’m not fucked, not quite

Bled white
Bled white