When I was your age.

04/21/2011

This is the tale of my first concert trip, which ties into the time period I am in for telling my story.

We set out to Columbus, OH filled with determination, sugar, and a fanatical desire for a change of scenery. The year was 1994, I was in 10th grade. Adam bought tickets to see Pennywise, a punk band which fit perfectly the energy and blunderings of that age, at least for us.

Adam was VP of transportation for the ambitious excursion of our collective, he provided a ratty station wagon held together by stickers and tape. He had hair which was composed of about five 2-foot spikes. The thing about tall mohawks is they bend on car ceilings and end up tilting horizontally like broken monuments. Our group was Adam, Chris the muscle, Neil the blue-haired slob, Joe the 3-foot skater, and myself. They were the dressing to my teenage cuisine, drivers to my notional limousine.

The trip was quick and messy. We blasted music through an Ohio town covered in signs which said "Noise Ordinance Enforced" in a celebration of the simple subversion of the musical medium of 3-chord distortion. We made the 3 hour drive free from speeding tickets and vomit.

Adam and Neil were attending some sort of open university guitar class the day after the show. I didn't attend the class, my guitar playing was beyond hope . Somehow they were given dorms as part of the enrollment which were walking distance from the club. Before the concert that evening, we smoked some through a red glass water bong in the dorms. This was my first time taking in weed without other substances in the mix, before that it had been with alcohol at teenage parties. In the room, I seemed to be getting nothing from it. We departed to walk to the show.

A rather attractive college girl shared the elevator with us and spoke to me. At the time, her voice sounded like the teachers on old Charlie Brown cartoons. Come to think of it, the experience of excessive thc is often very much like animated Charles Schultz land. This was my interpretation of the conversation.

Her: Are you here for the guitar class?
Me: No.
Her: Oh. You look like you would be in one of those guitar bands.
Me: Thanks.

Days later, Adam told me the real conversation:

Her: Are you an art student?
Me: No.
Her: Oh. Well, you look like an art student.
Me: Thanks.

Maybe she thought this because I had white and purple hair at the time. Adam said I should have asked her out, but that would have broke my streak of having relationships without the burden of instigating them. Come to think of it, my life is a series of random oddities which seem to happen to me without my consent or contributing cause. Does anyone else out there feel the same? At any rate, I was in far too paranoid a state to hold a conversation.

Sight opened up sprawling, the concert spread out before us like a parting curtain. There were no lines of security between the band and stage, you could run between the members and leap into the crowd.

I talked to a girl there named Holly, and we kissed when time came to leave, for anonymity, for youth, for the beautiful freedom from burden which is so easy to lose with age, for attraction and fun, for silent desperation and hormone waves. We walked away smiling.

The show was fun overall. We smelled like cigarettes and spilled beer traveling home on slick highway, open windows and laughter. Time caught up and we were gone.

"Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald