Getting Over Jack Wagner (20 page)

My left temple starts to pound. Faintly, I hear “So, what do you do to stay in shape?” buzzing somewhere near my left ear. If Hannah were in my head right now, she would want me to acknowledge my feelings, to discuss my anger, and she would be proud. I am enraged. I want to kick the table, rip my hair out, rip Donny's hair out by its slippery roots. I feel gypped, scammed, tricked, had. Deep down, I know it's not Donny I'm furious with. It's myself, of course. For letting myself put so much hope into this, for thinking I would be different or he would be different or something, anything, would be different from what I had expected.

Where do you go, I want to know, to find the things you weren't expecting?

Carla appears with the unlimited portion of our evening: an enormous basket of phallic garlic breadsticks. Donny winks at her and rips into one with his teeth. I feel the last of my Donny-fantasy collapsing—breadsticks, hair gel, exfoliating face mask, neon pink condom, Merlot—all of it running together in a snickering mess around my appropriately funereal black shoes. As he starts chomping the breadstick, I realize why it is I feel like I know him already: Donny is the guy I've always warned Andrew against becoming.

Through a haze of headache, I hear a cell phone begin to ring and realize it's attached to Donny. He reaches into his shiny suit pocket, happy to attract the attention of all the enormous middle-aged diners nearby. Unlike with Andrew, the phone itself doesn't surprise me. Nor does Donny's preoccupied stare as he answers. Then he lowers his voice and mutters: “Yeah, man. It's going all right.”

To spare us both, I pretend not to have heard. I focus on the breadsticks. I down the rest of my beer. When Donny bleeps off the phone—“Sorry,” he fibs, “sometimes I can't leave work behind”—something inside me snaps like a twig. All sense of social decency, of public humility, of proper dating/dining/pasta-eating etiquette vanishes as I am seized with an overwhelming sense of frustration, of futility, and before I know it I hear myself yelling: “My best friend got engaged!”

The enormous man at the next table frowns at me over an unlimited trough of minestrone. Donny drops his nub of breadstick like a piece of incriminating evidence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he bellows, for the benefit of the onlookers. He raises both his palms in mock surrender. “What are you getting at? I've only known you an hour.”

As I was saying: I am much better off alone.

A
rriving at Wissahickon College at the height of the Seattle grunge craze gave me all kinds of hope. I had paid my dues with high school rock stars, and learned from my mistakes. That summer, I'd trashed all of Z Tedesco's mixes and buried every pre-1985 tape in the bottom of my closet. I pierced my upper ear (despite Mom's warnings about nerve damage) and my arrival on a college campus with a duffel bag full of black-and-denim was roughly coinciding with Pearl Jam's
Ten.

My rock star was so close I could taste him.

Unfortunately, I had chosen a college in western Pennsylvania where, I soon discovered, the predominant color was khaki and the predominant song, Jimmy Buffett's “Margaritaville.” My first semester I remember only in fragments of foods and songs and social missteps: keg beer, chicken-flavored ramen, damp fraternity basements, Naughty by Nature, 2:00
A.M.
phone calls to Hannah at Oberlin, one disastrous dance party at the student activity center. Late-night talks with my beautiful blond roommate, who was dating a beautiful blond soccer player who greeted me, “Hey, bud!”

“I don't get why you want musicians,” my roommate was fond of saying. Her name was Ashley, she was from Connecticut, and had once brushed against Ricky Schroder's elbow in a CVS. “They're too skinny. But I bet they have big dicks.”

This, I was learning, was not uncommon talk for beautiful blond girls from Connecticut. They liked to shock, and were often secretly raunchy. Ashley kept a sex diary with explicit lists of “Things I Want to Try” and “Things I've Tried” (with ratings). We were ideal roommates, actually, and would be for nearly three years: different enough that we didn't fight, similar enough that we could share every detail of our sex lives.

“I'm right, aren't I?” she asked me. “Bigger than the norm.”

“I can't really say,” I said. Which was true. I didn't have much basis for comparison. “But I can tell you that being with a musician is intense.” I crunched some ramen. “Ever tried it?”

“Not yet,” Ashley said.

Unfortunately, the boys I was kissing my first year of college didn't exactly qualify as intense. There was Andrew, for a whopping six semi-platonic weeks. A guy in my English seminar who briefly impressed me with his theory that Frankenstein and the monster were gay lovers. A Sigma Nu with a tongue like a sausage. A guy in men's chorus who sang phallic alma maters about trees, glens, dames and lassies. A theater major who I fell madly in love with until I spied him wearing lavender tights in
Kiss Me, Kate.

When it came time for fall registration, I took matters into my own hands.

The moment I stepped inside Goodman-Sawyer Music Building, I knew I'd found my niche. After two semesters spent in boring brown lecture halls accumulating required 101s, everything about this building struck me as the aftermath of some violent bout of passion: the mussed, finger-wracked heads of hair, broken chalk, untucked shirts, the mild scent of sweat in the air. As I took a seat, I surveyed the other students in Music Theory. They were not your typical Wissahickon variety. All of them were scribbling distractedly in wire-bound notebooks (composing music on the page?) or gazing out the window (composing music in their heads?) or alternating between the two.

Not wanting to appear conspicuous, I busied myself scrawling the lyrics to “All I Need” over and over until the professor arrived. He was over nine feet tall, made of beard and corduroy.

“Welcome,” he said. It wasn't a booming “welcome,” like most professors' were. The word seemed to germinate somewhere deep inside his peppery tufts of beard and crawl grudgingly out of the corner of his mouth. “This is Music Theory. I am your professor. Call me Alvin. And this young man”—his beard nodded toward the first row—“is your T.A. Radley.”

I located the guy in the front row who lifted one hand in a distracted salute. He had long dirty blond hair tucked behind his ears and was wearing a T-shirt that said “Beethoven Lives!”

“Radley is a senior. A music major. And, if I might add, quite a good clarinetist.” Alvin's hand drowned in the beard for a moment, then reappeared scratching his Adam's apple. “He will provide one-on-one instruction as needed,” Alvin concluded, which I decided I needed right away.

Radley's one-on-one instruction was dispensed in the basement of the music building, in a tiny room stuffed with a chunky black piano, a stereo circa 1910, and a rack of classical albums. The walls were covered with millions of tiny dots: a four-sided migraine headache. “Soundproofing,” Radley explained, the night of our first session. He had very pale skin that flushed damply when he got excited. “So we can be as loud as we want.”

That said, hooking up with Radley the T.A. by the month's end did not prove too much of a challenge. We were alone, after all, at night, soundproofed, and squashed on a piano bench hip to hip. All it took was one botched étude for him to take my hands in his (you know, to adjust my fingering position) except that my fingers wound up readjusted somewhere around his corduroy crotch.

“Will this affect my grade?” I whispered.

Radley's upper lip sprouted four beads of sweat, mingling with the walls in a dotty haze.

Unlike in the dorms, Radley and I didn't have to scheme to be alone during T.A. sessions. There were no roommates to avoid, no soccer players to confront, no hallmates to duck while flossing. It was the easiest rock-star love I'd ever had. All I had to do was sign up: name, date, and time of session.

“Where do I sign?” Ashley said. I laughed her off, not wanting to admit that she'd tapped into my greatest fear: that I was just one member of Radley's vast Music Theory brothel. “He sounds experimental,” she said, smacking her lips.

And he was. Unfortunately, this was not because Radley was wildly creative, but because of the difficult logistics in the music room. I had already spent considerable time bragging to Ashley about our exploits:

a) on the windowsill

b) on the piano bench

c) on top of the piano (a la
Pretty Woman).

Unfortunately, in the interest of my passing the course, part of our T.A. sessions actually did consist of me playing horrible études about farm animals and singing off-key scales. I tried to view it as foreplay. While I
la-la-la
ed my way through my triads, Radley listened intently, kissing me when I hit the right notes. Sometimes, he whispered his secret tricks for remembering the triads (the NBC theme song, the commercial jingle for CVS).

One Wednesday night, we found ourselves on a red leather sofa in the faculty lounge (thanks to Radley's official staff keys). A Vaughan Williams CD was playing on the stereo. A Beethoven bust scowled behind my left shoulder. Suddenly Radley said: “D flat.”

“What?” I opened my eyes.

“Your sex noise,” he panted. “It's a D flat.”

The next morning, I switched my major to English.

Cold. Snow. Disillusionment. By January of my sophomore year, everything at Wissahickon College was beginning to look exactly the same. Every flannel was the identical blue-and-green plaid. Every guy on campus was Tyler or Jason or Jed. Every song was sung by Blues Traveler. Every lecture revolved around “unpacking the metaphor.” It was time to check out the local bar.

My first trip to Jack's Tavern would mark the beginning of a new era in rock-star infatuation: the bar pickup. Though I wasn't twenty-one yet, I managed to get an old ID from my “Wissahickon Big Sister” Val, a rugby player whose sisterly influence consisted of teaching me how to funnel, chug, and dip tobacco. To the bouncer, I was Valerie Carroll from Mount Vernon, New York, born September 21, 1971. (The fact that I was not five-foot four-inches, blond-haired, or one hundred fifty pounds went unnoticed.)

Jack's was operated by a beefy, pink guy named Jack who wore Jack Daniels freebie T-shirts and regularly posted Jack Daniels specials. Not that anyone ever ordered them, or found his gimmicks amusing. The bulk of Jack's livelihood revolved around pitchers of Bud Light, Miller Light, Coors Light, and plastic boats of popcorn a frightening shade of salty, industrial yellow.

Jack's clientele was roughly seventy-five percent Wissahickon students, twenty-five percent locals who surrounded the bar in a tense barricade of Central Pennsylvanian flannel. Four of them were a band called Fistfight, a name that carried all kinds of unnerving Greaser/Soc undertones. On Thursdays, they performed their unique brand of Seattle-influenced-hard-core-small-town rock, a sort of John Mellencampy/Meat Puppets-ish thing. When the tunes got too hard, Jack gave the band the cutoff sign, and they reluctantly returned to the bar, while the Spin Doctors's “Two Princes” sailed happily through the speakers and seventy-five percent of the crowd relaxed.

Fistfight is where I spotted Travis.

“This here's the band,” the lead singer would announce each week, while the bass player thwacked a string in accompaniment. “That's Curtis Shoemaker on the drums. Sparky Elwell on bass. And that mean electric guitar, that's Travis Young.”

Travis strummed a chord in response, a blast of metal that made half the bar cringe and one guy yell: “That's no ‘Free Bird,' buddy!” I, on the other hand, was quickly falling in love. After all the boyfriends I had (let's face it) convinced myself were rock-star material (e.g., sixteen-year-old in marching band) Travis Young was the real thing. He wore an authentic, pre-
Blair Witch
blue knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows. Dog tags hung in a formidable metal clump around his neck. While he played, he focused only on his fingers flying around on the strings. He was authentic. He was a musician in a real band, a paid band, with gigs and sessions and sets and their name chalked permanently on the blackboard underneath “Jack's $2 Shots of Jack!”

Soon enough, I was a Thursday-night regular. I sat near the band, but not too near, buoyed by pitchers and popcorn and whatever girls from the dorm I could coerce into coming with me. Later in life, I would sit alone watching bands. In fact, I would usually prefer it. But in college I was an amateur. Take, for example, the first time Travis and I made eye contact and I nearly choked on an unpopped corn. It was weeks before I would refine my pickup moves: the aggressive eye contact, confident chewing, seductive sipping and swallowing that would precede the verbal approach.

One night in March, I broke out a new lipstick: Plum Dream.

“I hate to tell you this,” Ashley said, as she watched me prep in the mirror. “But I think you might be a groupie.”

“Excuse me?” The Plum stopped midlip. This was not okay. Groupies were pathetic, weren't they? Groupies had no shame. No self-respect. Groupies passed out in the backs of minivans wearing half-shirts made of Lycra. “No. I'm not.”

“Honestly,” Ashley said, sounding apologetic. “I'm pretty sure you are.”

As soon as she said this, I knew I had to make my move. I couldn't live with the possibility that I had unwittingly turned groupie. If I could just elevate my status from groupie to girlfriend, then I would have nothing to be ashamed of. I could drool over Travis Young to my heart's content.

That same night, after Jack had given Fistfight the cutoff and Travis chugged a post-gig beer, I got up the nerve to approach him. I'd rehearsed a million different openers, from complimenting his band to complimenting his voice to just complimenting his pecs and getting it over with. But when I reached the bar, I was only so bold as to ask his left shoulder: “Excuse me. Do you have the time?”

Travis Young's broad flannel back pivoted slowly away from a wall of broad flannel backs. I could feel the watch in my pocket gouging my thigh. “I was just wondering if…”

“Nine thirty-two,” Travis said. “Wanna beer?”

And we were off.

Beer #1:

“I've seen you here before, you know,” Travis said.

“Really?” I tossed my hair, all innocence. “When?”

Beer #3:

“So how old are you?” he asked, toying with my split ends.

“You tell me first.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty.”

He took the hand away.

“…two,” I added, and he put it back.

Beer #5:

“You don't have a boyfriend, do you?” Travis asked.

“Not yet,” I whispered.

The magic of Bud Light, ladies and gentlemen.

Beer #8:

“Wanna make out?”

The fact that Travis Young was the first person to use the term “make out” since approximately 1985—when most guys moved on to the sex-as-hardware genre: screwing, nailing, banging, etc.—not to mention used the word “wanna,” struck me as totally backwoods and, yes, totally endearing. Obviously, he was too focused on his music to care about keeping up with modern lingo. And as soon as we stepped into my dorm room, it was equally obvious he had no clue about the fundamentals of hooking up at small liberal arts colleges.