Authors: Dave Holmes
Party of One (10 page)
I spent my whole college career, and then most of the rest of my twenties, loving guys who were either constitutionally incapable of loving me back or wise enough to keep their distance. It was a dumb, exquisitely painful, self-destructive pattern that I seemed to enjoy. If it never led to any romantic or sexual satisfaction for me, if I lived my life in a perpetual state of frustration and heartache, at least it was predictable. I was a lot of fun to be around in the '90s.
Here are a few of the songs that got me through it.
This one gets the early crush period down kind of perfectly; it's a physical trauma, an affliction, and one you don't want to shake off. You see a confident yet bookish senior pull out his word processor from across the library, you watch as he furrows his brow and taps away, and this song cues up in your soul. It's glorious. It makes you want to sing, even if you are in a quiet area. You can imagine yourself joining in this one, a capella, with Coko and the gals. You in a mock turtleneck and Cross Colours pants, them in doorknocker earrings and flannels casually tied about the waist, on a stoop in a rapidly gentrifying urban area. Afterwards you'll go for fudge!
A hot bowl of cheese meant to be sung with a tear-choked voice and a freshly shattered heart. This one is so potent, so dramatic, they couldn't even find a good enough American singer to get it across. So they went up to Canada, taught Céline the lyrics phonetically, styled her like Elayne Boosler, and we were off to the races. For extra comfort, watch the video on YouTube and count all the times where she gesticulates on the wrong words.
PM Dawn gets lumped in with Digable Planets and Arrested Development and all those other early-'90s groups that pushed hip-hop into a gentler direction and then immediately fizzled out, but we forget that they wrote some fairly epic pop songs, and did it in caftans. Like all of their songs, this one is awash in hippie nonsense, but once you get to the chorus, you can sing along, and snap, and smoke, and cry. And repeat.
You will inevitably become confused and frustrated by the fact that your boy does not, maybe even cannot, love you back, and you will turn again to music. Yes, of course there is “Everybody Hurts,” but anybody can be heartbroken to that one. You're special. Skip a few ahead on
Automatic for the People
until you get to this one, which is every bit as hangdog sad but, with its climactic “fuck me kitten,” gives us a rare peek at Michael Stipe's horny side. At the height of my addiction to this song, I used to think about Todd, a viciously sexy and not particularly nice hockey player I hung out with for a while. I think he went on to be in the Army Special Forces. Todd was committed to hotness. (Incidentally, according to whatever magazines I was reading, Michael Stipe was hanging out with Stephen Dorff a lot in the mid-'90s, so he knows about intense crushes on sexy idiots.)
That whole Buffalo Tom
Let Me Come Over
album, really. I don't know about you, but when I hear “Larry,” I am running toward whomever I have a crush on, and he is running toward me, in the pouring rain, and then we are kissing. It is possible that I am living inside a WB young-adult show, even now.
Sometimes you don't have to know all the words for a song to be your go-to heartbreak anthem. Sometimes it just has to have a title like “Desperately Wanting,” and a part in the chorus after a bunch of words you haven't bothered to learn where the lead singer sings the words “desperately wanting,” and you can shout it along with himâbecause you, too, are desperately wanting. He understands. You are on the same page, you and whatever the guy's name is from Better Than Ezra.
Oh, who even knows what this one is about. It's just kind of moody and plodding and “we were merely freshmen” is a great excuse for unwise romantic fixations, even when you're twenty-eight. Plus, for a moment, the goddamn thing was inescapable; it seems wasteful not to use it as the soundtrack to a self-destructive crush.
Were these guys ever happy? I picture them all in windbreakers, on a late autumn afternoon, just having finished crying. Every song is about one single person bravely dealing with some agonizing thing, or standing stalwart in the face of a chill wind, or putting on a smile while inside he's aching, just aching, and when you're young and you love torturing yourself, it is exactly what you need to hear.
A potent reminder that, no matter how intense the one-way fixation is, how hot and focused the love beams you're shooting out of your eyes are, or how perfect everything would be if he could just feel a tiny bit of the same about you as you do about him, hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away. It'll all pass in a few weeks and you'll be on to the next one. You and SWV will be back harmonizing over Fruitopias before you know it.
My senior year of college, I was the campus social chair, because I loved to throw parties and also nobody gets more done than a young person who is furiously sublimating his need for intimacy. And so it was that in the summer of 1993, I was sent to a student leadership conference at Emory University in Atlanta, where something happened to me that you are not going to believe, but that I swear to God is absolutely true.
That summer, incidentally, was the one where I had decided I would come out to my family. I was still somewhere between partially and completely out at school, and since I'd already more or less decided I wouldn't be coming back to St. Louis after graduation, it would be the last time we'd spend more than a few days together. And how better to celebrate your last summer with your parents than by making an announcement that forces them, for at least a few brief moments, to picture you having sex?
I came home in late May, set down my bags, saw their smiling faces, and mentally dragged and dropped this task from early June to very, very late August. Oh, sure, I meant to sit them down and say something, but we were having such a nice time. I oscillated wildly between an honest desire for them not to hear about it from someone else, to a very real wish that someone else would hurry up and tell them. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't have anyone to tell me what to do, so I did nothing.
In mid-August, I hopped on a plane to Atlanta to spend three days with some other student leaders from around the country at this conference. This being the early 1990s, political correctness was in full bloom, and this event would focus on programming functions that would reflect our culture's growing diversity. As conservative and homogeneous as my college and hometown were, I imagined this conference as a Utopia filled with different types of people, all mutually respecting one another; a really sexy Benetton ad. Whatever doubts I had about myself and my looming announcement would simply melt away under the stern eye of our retreat leaders: tough-but-caring Lou Gossett Jr. types who'd beat some pride and self-reliance into me, to the point where I'd hardly be able to wait to get home and tell my parents the good news. The informational brochure arrived a week or so before the event and revealed that the conference would be titled “Diversity: Isn't That Special?” I had a bad feeling, and I immediately got to work repressing it.
The registration table was directly underneath the giant
DIVERSITY: ISN'T THAT SPECIAL
?
banner, and I signed my papers and received my room assignment as Arrested Development's “People Everyday” bumped out of the ballroom's PA system. Just when I was finishing up, Debi, a pantsuited administrator with a fanny pack and a harsh attempt at the Chynna Phillips/Jane from
Melrose Place
hairdo, fixed her eyes on me with a look of practiced disapproval. “Blue eyes,” she sneered. “We know all about people like you.
Go sit on the floor.
” I'm more hazel, but the distinction didn't seem important, so I went and sat on the floor next to a beefy lacrosse type in a Clemson T-shirt. “Hello,” said Clemson. “Welcome to a clumsy parable about racism.” “They
wouldn't,
” I said, as a Hispanic girl from Vassar was led to a table where a group of brown-eyed people ate steak and baked potatoes. They would. They
are.
And so it continued: all the brown-eyed people were shown to tables and given fancy meals, while all of the blond girls in topknotsâand in the tradition of student leadership conferences, this thing was roughly 94Â percent blond girls in topknotsâwere sent to huddle on the floor and share those packets of orange crackers with peanut butter in between. Clemson and I watched blonde after blonde hit the deck and scan the room in frustration, thinking something must be the matter, minds getting primed to be blown. A blue-eyed Janeane Garofalo type from UVA plopped herself down next to us. “Racism's bad news, huh? Gimme a cracker.”
After all the conference attendees were accounted for, and right when we were speculating as to whether they'd lead the blue-eyed people outside and turn a fire hose on us, Debi took the stage. “Oh, here it comes,” said UVA. Debi's voice fought with the feedback for a moment: “Welcome to âDiversity: Isn't That Special?' Now, you might have noticed that some of you have been treated differently than others.”
“Yep, got that,” said Clemson as a murmur passed over the floor.
“Doesn't feel too good, does it?” Debi continued.
“Oh, it's awful,” I whispered.
“Well, that's because we⦔
“â¦are doing a thing about racism,” we said.
“â¦have taught you kind of a sneaky lesson⦔
“â¦about racism.”
“â¦about racism.”
The murmur grew to a roar. Blond buns bobbed this way and that. “See, some of you, just because of the color of your eyes, had a completely different experience than your neighbors, and you may not even have known why.” The room was in a full uproar. The topknots simply could not take this information in. “See, racism is still alive and well in this country, and some people like to judge other people on the color of their skin.
It's not fair, is it?
” The brown-eyed kids at the tables, many of whom were black or Hispanic and had therefore, as minority student leaders, probably been forced to endure at least one of these simulations before, mostly shrugged and finished up their baked potatoes. “You are free to introduce yourselves to one another. Talk about what you've learned.”
The topknots made a beeline for the black kids, with speeds that tested the integrity of their scrunchies. “Is this what it's like for you?” “You guys, I am so sorry!” “Can I touch your hair?” Baby steps toward enlightenment.
“Diversity: Isn't That Special?” continued along these lines. The next day, we were given a standardized test comprised largely of questions about jazz and basketball, to illustrate the cultural bias of the SAT. Too bad for Debi and her people, I was deep into an Afro-centric, Tribe Called Questâinspired phase that summer, and had a huge crush on a college friend who talked a lot about sports, so I scored a 1540. The topknots got their poor numbers back, learned the point of the exercise, and shook their heads
no
with faces of steely determination.
Have you heard about this systemic racism?
their faces said.
Well, we just did, and it's bad.
Right around here was the first time I ever even began to view my homosexuality as an asset rather than a liability. Maybe if I came out to some of these administrators, they'd view me as less of an oppressor. Maybe if I let them know I was actually a minority, too, we could actually have a constructive talk about what I was going through, in real time, right then. So in a small-group discussion about sensitivity to gay and lesbian issues (alas, the
B
and the
T
were not yet invited to the party), I piped up: “You know, I'm actually gay myself, so⦔ and the facilitator squinted her eyes, made her lips disappear, tilted her head at a perfect 45-degree angleâthe international symbol for You Poor Thingâand interrupted me. “So brave,” she stage-whispered, and then got right back to her spiel about campus safer-sex programs. It went that way with each facilitator I came out to: the squint, the lips, the 45-degree head tilt. No dialogue, no “How are you?” no inquiry as to whether anything they were saying was resonating in any meaningful way, just a condescending look. I was being treated like a box of fragile glass figurines, or Cousin Geri from
The Facts of Life.
The more sensitive among us hadn't really learned any constructive ways to vent our negative emotions in 1993;
Jagged Little Pill
was still two years off. Instead, Clemson, UVA, and I chose to express our frustrations through the medium of drinking. There was an Applebee's across the street from campus, and once things got to be too much, one of us would give the high signâindex finger making quick circles in the airâand one by one we'd disappear. We'd grab a table on the patio and smoke cigarettes and laugh and drink things that were blue. I came out to them, and they said “Okay,” and we discussed it a little bit and then got on with what we'd been talking about, which for the record is exactly the way it's supposed to go. By accident, this conference was teaching us all something.
There was a farewell banquet on the evening of the third day, and as student leaders of all eye colors finished up their steak and potatoes, the administrators fired up a slide projector. And there it was, up on the silver screen: a greatest-hits compilation from “Diversity: Isn't That Special?” Slide after slide of white girls crying on patient brown shoulders, set to carefully selected hits of the day: “Free Your Mind” by En Vogue, “A Whole New World” by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle, and then, finally, “What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding.”
Except it was the version from the soundtrack to
The Bodyguard.
The Curtis Stigers version.
Oh,
hell
no.
Listen: you can condescend to me. You can cut me off and treat me like an injured baby bird when I try to start a dialogue with you. But don't you dare think you have anything to teach me if you don't know who Elvis Costello is.
I gave the high sign, and Clemson and UVA were headed for the door before my finger could complete a full rotation.
By our second round, the blue drinks started doing their job and our tongues were loosened, to the point where Clemson leaned forward and asked a question I'd waited a lifetime to hear: “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, no. Yeah,” I answered, out of habit. “I'm fine.”
And then I took a deep breath. “No. You know what, guys? I'm not okay. That was bullshit.” My new friends nodded. “We spent three days talking about sensitivity and diversity, when I am right here being diverse and needing some sensitivity and nobody's letting me say anything. I am about to come out to my fucking family, which is scary, and I would love it if just one person in my fucking life would listen to me.” People started to look over, because I was loud, and I didn't care. “I cannot be the only person in this world who's gone through this fucking problem. I do not need to be told how brave I am, I do not need the head at the 45-degree angle.” Clemson and UVA gave a puzzled look, but chose to let me continue releasing steam. “I need what you and you and everyone I know has always had, and has never had to worry about not having, and that's someone they respect who has been through what they're going through, who can sit them down and tell them they're okay, and listen to what they have to say, and
tell them what to fucking do.
I am alone, and I am
furious,
and I am
scared to fucking death,
and I just want someone who isn't an idiot who's gone through this to
Tell.
Me.
What.
To.
Do.”
We are now at the part of the story that you are not going to believe, but again: this actually happened.
I sat back in my wrought-iron patio seat, wiped my eyes, and lit a Marlboro Light. “That's it,” I exhaled. “I just want someone to tell me what to do.”
These words left my mouth, and in the very next second the door opened, and out onto the patio of the Applebee's across from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, walked the Indigo Girls.
The.
Indigo.
Girls.
And not the Indigo Girls and their friends. Not the Indigo Girls and their manager and publicist. Just the Indigo Girls. Just Amy and Emily, taking time out to enjoy some boneless wings with their choice of sauce.
It was as though they had seen some kind of gay distress signal in the Atlanta skies and reported for duty. They sat down at the table next to us. My jaw did not so much drop as unhinge. The Blue Curaçao was really pumping through my bloodstream, so I did not hesitate to turn to my left and start in: