A Formational Turn

When my taste for Carman began to wane, and I realized that Weird Al Yankovic’s Bad Hair Day is not very funny the second time, or the third, I was uncertain where to turn. My brother and I had come across an album by A Tribe Called Quest on cassette, but that wasn’t it, and I remember liking Alanis Morisette, but not in a way that could define who I was as a junior high student and new adult. Luckily for me, my best friend’s mother began driving a school bus around this time. Unfortunately, that meant that he had to be picked on while his mother fought it, or fought ignoring it by way of the oversized rectangular mirror hanging over her smartly-permed bouffant. And that is the perfect picture of being 13 or 14 until you replace it with one for which record labels sell t-shirts. So, the story goes that someone dropped a loaded 36-sleeve CD case by the wheel well and forgot about it for however long it is that the bus company cares for its lost and founds. Said case then made its way into the hands of my friend whose mother was not as concerned with cursing (she was a bus driver) as my own. It was filled with a collection of narrow scope, consisting mainly of Korn, Rage Against the Machine, and Insane Clown Posse albums that seemed to fan out the light in the room as in an empty sanctuary when it struck each scratched and misused silver disc. We sat in his basement room listening to each on a battery powered CD player, stopping every once in a while to play a track from an Up in Smoke vinyl his father had nearly worn out. My friend made a habit of this: breaking things up with a Cheech and Chong track before letting a disc play through a full rotation. I understand it now as a subconscious critique of the vinyl case of found albums, a prediction, perhaps, of the albums’ destinies. I believe that such a soundtrack fueled the adolescent uneasiness belonging to my friend and me, though it felt extinguished or at least diminished at the time. I bought the t-shirts and borrowed the albums under cover of darkness, using headphones, staying up late in my basement room, tired the next day.

I made some friends who had musical taste similar to my own. One of them had a crazy name and then did heroine and was dumped at his high school graduation party by his girlfriend who turned the shindig into her coming out. Maybe the heroine came after graduation. Anyhow, he loved the self-titled album by Rage Against the Machine, knew every lyric by heart, knew what had so pissed Zach off and was completely obsessed, said he would one day set himself on fire like the monk gracing the cover. This guy’s middle name was Clifford. He thought that, instead of History class, we should be made to study Zapatista Revolutionary Theory. Then he smoked a tea bag, literally, and stood outside of a local elementary school and screamed the lyrics to “Killing in the Name” until the police arrived and we ran. He had added a coda at the end—you know the end—repeating it at the top of his lungs until some kids were crying. Che would have been proud.

A year after that, my friend with the Cheech and Chong record began dating a girl who lived in a neighborhood with a name, and he began listening to Dave Matthews Band and U2. It was a mix CD that she had made him, the first CD-R I can recall. He went to a school dance with her. My other friends talked to the kids coming out of the dance, we didn’t dare step inside, making fun mostly, smoking from the hood of a car.

Two years after that, my friend who played bass for a Chimera rip-off troop found a Poison the Well album. I decided to get rid of the acts found on the bus.

Years later, my first friend and I roomed together and I looked through that case of immature, angsty metal. Beck’s Odelay was nested comfortably in the back under a layer of dust. And it began again.