Song To Get By

Friends,

This was spurred from Luke's post about the Something Corporate song that got him through a rough patch of his life. And I can commiserate. Not for the Something Corporate love, but for a song that sort of helped a person cope with an otherwise shitty time.

Back around the same time Luke was having his issues, sophomore year in college or thereabouts wasn't a particularly cheerful time for me either. In mean this in all honesty, you probably wouldn't recognize me in the guy I was. I was moody, angry often, lazy with school and a lot things I'm not now. Pretty much I was going through my obnoxious teenager phase, albeit a little late...all the while still trying to hold onto scraps of my Christian faith even though damn near everything in my life seemed contradictory to it.

And the record for me during that time was Tool's Aenima (see what I mean about contradictions?). For those of you who pawed through my CD collection during the MFA Garage Sale knows, I at one time had an interesting taste in music (how else can you defend owning two Primer 55 records, a One Minute Silence record, and three Insane Clown Posse records, not to mention stuff that was really indefensible {Forest for the Trees? Really?}). But Tool's Aenima was the perfect mix of loud music, weirdo pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, and prog-rock ballads that a person of my mental state could really dig. I still like that album too. I haven't listened to it in for a long time, but I wouldn't kick it out of bed if it nuzzled up one soft evening either.

And there's one song that really nails a moment for me. My girlfriend at the time was a partyer. She loved her booze and smokes. Was invigorated with drugs experimentation. And all that other stuff that as a strangely moral person, I couldn't understand or condone. Well, one night she went to a party with some friends of ours and drank a whole ton of booze. She put away a ton of tequila by herself, so by the time I show up at the party to say hello to everyone, the girlfriend is in the bathroom, trying to throw-up and struggling to breathe.

After some intense deliberation about the payoffs and pitfalls of taking her to the hospital (about an hour's worth I'd say), we decide its best if we take her. We carry her outside like a stretcher, which was no easy task (and I hurt my back in the process because the guy who helped me didn't do shit to help with the weight). We called ahead to the hospital, somebody met us outside and helped her onto a gurney, then we waited and talked. The bulk of the conversation was about 1)how sorry my friends were for letting her drink a half-bottle of tequila in under 20 minutes or so, and 2)what are we going to tell the police when we would inevitably be questioned as to why this 20 year old suffered alcohol poisoning. My position on the police was: "Fuck you, guy. I ain't lying for any of you shitheads." My position on the tequila drinking was pretty similar.

So while we waited, and waited, for her in the emergency room and for the police to question us about this situation, for a moment we sat in my car to listen to the radio. I had on a mix tape I made myself, and I played the following song as loud as the speakers on my Buick Skylark would go, and headbanged the frustration I felt out of me. I still remember shaking the steering the wheel and shouting along with the words of this thing. It even kind of unnerved the one friend who sat in the car with me (another Tool fan, who would later go on to e-mail me everything he figured out about the Tool record Aenima while on LSD).

Here it is, Tool's Hooker With a Penis:


What's this song got to do with anything that happened that night? Nothing. An anthem about selling out couldn't be further from the moment. But it was loud. It was angry. It filled the right kind of void at the moment like a midnight peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Every time I think of Tool, or even a song with strong personal connotations, I always think of this one. Can't help it. Every bit of frustration I felt, from the stress of the relationship I had with this girl in the ER, from the stress of the moment, to hating my friends, to hating drinking, to hating my hate for liquor like I could have been there to stop it if I weren't such a prude, to being a generally moody bitch all came to a head right there in the Skylark while this song tested my speakers' mettle. I'd like to think that everything was sort of fixed because of that moment in the Skylark, but nowhere near. I had another year's worth of relationship duty to pull with that girl and this group of friends before I was able to divorce myself from everything that caused the issues.

What happened to the girlfriend? Well, she wasn't alcohol poisoned. Just stupid. And we were scared. They didn't pump her stomach or give any medication or anything. Just waited it out. I drove her back to her dorm around 3 that morning, giving her this little lecture on responsibility or something, I don't know. Surely I had every right to be holier than thou (not anymore, but hey, at the time, Jesus was my navigator and calling in my bombing runs).

After we broke up, I asked her if she ever cheated on me. She was certainly the type to do so, and I was especially susceptible to it, since I was a wet blanket and she was a party blanket (maybe even of the beach bingo variety). And I had a friend, the guy whose house it was she had to be carried out of, who was more her type and they spent a lot of time together when I was at work. So I asked if she ever cheated on me with him. "No," she said. "He wouldn't have me."

viva el mustache

ps...love is a mixtape review coming sometime soon