By Working at a record store taught me a tragic truth; no matter how much you love your favorite albums, they’ll never be as popular as they deserve to be. Each month at Merry-Go-Round Magazine, I dust off some long-overlooked records, revisit my pretentious past, and explore how this music forever etched itself into my history. Eventually, all your memories get marked down and thrown into The Bargain Bin.
It was finally spring, our last semester before we could cast off the shackles of grade seven and move on to more of the same in eighth. As I descended the stairs to the first-floor elective classrooms, passing shop class, home economics, and the music room, I was unaware that an important event in my life was about to unfold. A perfect companion was about to walk into my life, the type that’s like a soulmate of sorts, minus the romance. A friend cosmically connected to you forever and in a fully platonic way. One might say, “a best friend,” but that doesn’t adequately cover it.
I’d snuck into the art room early to grab a seat in the back. To come into an almost empty room on the first day of class was serene. I could sit anywhere and give myself room to breathe. I sat tapping my pencil against the spiral coil of my notebook, occasionally shooting a glance at the other students filing in.
You could tell which were the bullies; they were the dim dudes that wandered the halls in packs of four or more, looking for anything out of the ordinary to fake laugh at or point out. I was often out of the ordinary just being me. I looked down at my bootleg Soul Coughing t-shirt; the head of EL OSO smiled, staring back at me. They were my favorite band, and I wanted to advertise that, but it was a shirt the pack of wild jerks would question.
I’d heard it all before: Soul Coughing? Who the fuck is that? Why would you listen to something they don’t even play on the radio? Super Bomb, what now? Well, I’ve never heard it.
They sat at a table a bit down from me, and I sighed in relief.
A slim little dude with gelled hair and Value City clothes slid into the seat across from me and said, “Hey, man, I’m Mat. I like to spell it with one ‘t’ because I figure if I’m going to shorten Matthew, I’m gonna do it shorter than anyone else.” We hit it off instantly.
I quickly learned my new friend and I shared a fondness for dumb cartoons and alt-comedy, making this class the highlight of my week. It was a place where we quoted bits from MTV’s SIFL & OLLIE, EARTHWORM JIM on Saturday mornings, and DR. KATZ on Comedy Central. We were colossal H. Jon Benjamin fans before anyone else. I appreciated his dry humor, reflecting the off-the-wall shows our peers weren’t tuning into. It made us the target of the jerks in this class, but Mat never let their bullshit get to him. He was always quick to make a joke or shoot some sarcastic zing back at them before they knew what hit them. He never cared what anyone thought of him; if he did, he never showed it.
We went on to attend the same high school, but our schedules never lined up, and our paths crossed infrequently. I’d be scurrying through the halls, weaving in and out of people gabbing away in front of their lockers, and hear someone call out, “Hey, Jackieboy!” Inevitably, when I glanced back, it was always Mat waving at me. I hadn’t yet embraced being called by my childhood nickname outside of family functions, but I didn’t mind if he said it. I considered him a brother.
—
Through the years, we would inevitably lose touch for weeks, months, and years, only to reunite and slide right back into the same groove we always were in, like dropping the needle on your favorite record to play back your favorite song without hearing any skips or pops. I wouldn’t think about Mat for a bit, then I’d heard from a friend of a friend he got in a car wreck and that the paramedic told him if he’d held his arm out the window at a hair to the right, the impact from the other car would have ripped it off, cigarette still between his fingers, and launched it out to traffic for all to see. Maybe he would hear from a friend of a friend that I was off following around unrequited crushes, sulking in my room instead of practicing the guitar, and buying too many CDs through the mail from Merge Records.
We reconnected after attending classes at the local community college, a place so close to our high school and had so many of the same students that everyone called it the sequel. Mat and I discovered a shared love for smoking weed to keep out the sadness and smoking cigarettes to have something to do between smoking weed and smoking more weed. He liked beer a lot, too, but I could never choke down more than one and figured it’d be nicer just to let him have them all to himself.
Mat and I always had so many ideas for comedy sketches and TV shows, but we lacked the ambition to pursue making them. Instead, we hid in Mat’s room in a cloud of smoke, listening to Iron Maiden and chain-smoking cigarettes to the glow of the Xbox 360. I’d never gotten the hang of first-person or any game where I can’t see behind the character I’m controlling on the screen. I panic, hitting buttons and flinging the POV camera in only the least helpful directions. Mat, a seasoned veteran of whatever intergalactic war space marines are always fighting, would screen-peek for my character’s location and laugh hysterically at how easy it was to slaughter me over and over and over and over and over and over.
I crafted many mix CDs for Mat, per my usual routine of compulsively delivering music to the ears of my favorite people. I always know what he’ll latch on to the hardest, but often, it’s something with a really buzzy guitar. One band he doted on was Chapel Hill alt-rockers The Comas and their 2004 spaced-out alt-rock album CONDUCTOR. It’s a sci-fi-tinged breakup record about the lead singer’s breakup with Michelle Williams back when she was hanging out at DAWSON’S CREEK—track three is called “Tonight on the WB,” if you don’t believe me. CONDUCTOR was a record that became the soundtrack to so many nights we spent driving around smoking weed and shooting the shit while the rest of the world slept.
Back in the mid-aughts, filling the tank with gas in my mom’s old Ford Windstar only cost around 20 bucks. It was much less expensive if I wanted to drive to the middle of nowhere late at night, flying down the highway for an hour, hopping off on an empty-looking exit to follow a twisty backroads. I’ve never been good at understanding the cardinal directions without looking at a map. Even then, my brain hated trying to process all the dots, lines, and names of towns stretched across the odd shapes that made up the boundaries of our states.
I have an innate sense of direction that transcends maps. It’s more of a feeling. I don’t have to pay much attention to my surroundings, and I still know which direction I came from and where I need to go. I am my own compass ruled by the earth’s magnetic fields or something scientific like that, I’m sure. Once I had my learner’s permit towards the end of high school, I would get lost every chance I had to see where different roads led. This would come in handy a few years later when I started smoking weed, allowing me to scoot around town getting high with the stereo blasting and not a cop in sight. I became an expert at using my knees to keep the steering wheel steady while I’d spark up—don’t tell my mom.
If I had a Friday or Saturday night off, I would pick Mat up from his parents and drive him around St. Louis and the surrounding areas for hours. He was always weary of driving to new places, something I always assumed was because his ancient Ford Ranchero was forever on the verge of death. It wasn’t quite a car, yet it wasn’t quite a truck, the sort of ‘70s experiment that, if it could talk, would scream to be put down because it just shouldn’t exist. The Ranchero’s paint had faded into blotches of gray, blue, and green that made it resemble the color of someone about to be sick. I never minded driving. Mat’s always good company, quick with a joke or funny observation, and always impressed by the tiniest details in things I’d studied a million times.
We’d travel in weird circles, heading out to the sticks, taking those long, dark, twisting roads I used to get lost on out in the sticks, passing my swirly blue glass piece back and forth, chain-smoking cigarettes, blowing smoke out of the cracked windows poisoning the night air.
On one such night, we circled the winding road around the sides of Grant’s Farm, rambling about putting loose tobacco on a road kill possum to make it look like a Clydesdale. (I honestly don’t remember what that was about beyond what I just said, but it’s a weird detail I can’t shake.) The Comas ripped through “Invisible Drugs” as we hid the ones we were smoking in the dark of the van. Mat yelled to me, “Hey, you remember that guy Jon? He was part of the group that used to pick on us in art class?”
“Yeah, of course. Those guys were fucking assholes who treated us like shit and constantly picked on us. I’ll never forget them.”
“Jon died last week in a car accident,” he said.
“Well, shit. That… sucks? I’m not sure how to feel about that, but, uh, whatever happened, he probably deserved it? Karma and all. He was a total asshole.”
“Nah, I’m just fucking with ya,” he said dryly. “Man, you went real dark, real quick.”
“You’re such a motherfucker.” I could see him smirking in the flashes of street lights.
—
We planned a night to meet and grab dinner for the first time in almost 15 years. I tossed around ideas in my head of a restaurant where we could sit and catch up for as long as we needed without screwing over the waitstaff by occupying a table. I picked a place not far from where we used to live, to Mat’s relief, squashing his anxiety of having to drive somewhere he wasn’t familiar with. It had been so long since I’d last seen my friend, and it made my stomach tie up in knots. I was anxious we wouldn’t have anything to talk about, as if this long pause would finally break precedent and the grooves in the record might skip to some other song we never bothered listening to.
My phone did its little buzzy dance, signaling a new text: Hey, buddy, I’m here! I got out of the car and saw him walking towards the restaurant. We immediately embraced and locked right back into that same song we always used to play. When we parted ways after a nice meal and three hours of catching up, Mat said, “I love you, man,” and I said, “I love you, too, dude.”
After we parted ways, I drove around for a few hours, listening to The Comas, retracing old routes we used to take in the darkness and under the stars, my brain flashing back memories and ideas we had and everything I wish I could do all over again but better. Life gets more complicated every year, and the world seems to get worse endlessly, but knowing that the same dude you always click with will always be the same one you hold in your memories is a great comfort. You can drop the needle on your favorite record and still play back your favorite song without hearing any pops or skips.
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