Once I Was Cool Read online

  PRAISE FOR MEGAN STIELSTRA

  "In Once I Was Cool, Megan Stielstra is warm and open and wise. Whether she’s writing about the complex loneliness of early motherhood or failing to rise to the occasion or find the right language while living abroad, Stielstra is a masterful essayist. From the first page tot he last, she demonstrates a graceful understanding of the power of storytelling. What she’s truly offering with her words, is the grandest of gifts."

  —ROXANE GAY, AUTHOR OF AN UNTAMED STATE

  "What an amazing cri de coeur Once I Was Cool is. Megan Stielstra tells us in a witty, sympathetic, confident voice who she is and what and whom she cares about most. Reading these essays, I laughed out loud and also found myself on the verge of tears so many times. This book should be read by anyone who's been in love, had a child or thought about having a child. So, probably, that's everyone."

  —CHRISTINE SNEED, AUTHOR OF LITTLE KNOWN FACTS

  "Megan Stielstra's wonderful writing and her storytelling bravery is truly a gift for everyone who reads her. Once I Was Cool is refreshing, hilarious, touching, and wise. If she keeps writing like this, I'm going to bet she'll always be cool."

  —KEVIN SAMPSELL, AUTHOR OF THIS IS BETWEEN US

  "Holy shit. I read Once I Was Cool in two and a half hours, then I started reading it again."

  –JAMIE IREDELL, AUTHOR OF I WAS A FAT DRUNK CATHOLIC SCHOOL INSOMNIAC

  “Megan Stielstra’s voice is so palpable, so immediate and vibrantly alive, it feels as though she’s standing right in front of you, sashaying her hips a little and maybe occasionally breaking into song, making you laugh so hard you don’t quite notice when you start to cry. A trickster constantly unpacking and upending what is meant by “fiction,” “truth” and “storytelling,” Stielstra has ultimately created a charming style wholly her own.”

  –GINA FRANGELLO, AUTHOR OF A LIFE IN MEN

  “Here’s the thing about Megan Stielstra: she has a profound understanding of where we all go in our minds, and the unique ability to turn it into a story that sounds like your new best friend is telling it to you. You know, the kind where you’re going “Oh my god that totally happened to me” or “It’s like you see inside my head” until she gets to the part where there’s suddenly a marching band following her down the street or she’s sleeping with the Incredible Hulk or having a three-way which is the part where you go “Okay that didn’t happen to me but damn, why does it still seem like it did?” Megan Stielstra brings it to the party and rocks it.”

  –ELIZABETH CRANE, AUTHOR OF WE ONLY KNOW SO MUCH

  “Everyone Remain Calm is a rarity: a bold, imaginative, and cunning collection of stories. Spanning a wide variety of styles, forms, and tones, the language here is unapologetically inventive and often humorous, while the sentiments are deeply heartfelt. Ms. Stielstra’s inimitable voice is a fiercely unique creation.”

  –JOE MENO, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT PERHAPS

  “Stielstra—collector, curator and facilitator of so many stories—also writes beautifully and kinetically. Her work possesses a rare aural quality, no doubt the result of so much time on stage, or even in front of a classroom… in Everyone Remain Calm she gleefully tests the boundaries of the short-story form.”

  –TIME OUT CHICAGO

  “Stielstra has staked her career on live performance storytelling that is often emulated but never duplicated. In print and especially live, she urges the audience to come with her on adventures that can get both hysteric in pitch and absolutely still: few performers can teeter their audience between these extremes while still engaging such a personal connection. It is the story that reigns supreme, that dictates what will happen on stage. Her delivery is just one part of the show, like the musicians that back her, or the singer that swaps a story duet, or the brass band parading around her.”

  –CHICAGO LITERARY EXAMINER

  “Her theatrical performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm.”

  –CBS CHICAGO, BEST NEW CHICAGO BOOKS

  Megan Stielstra

  Personal Essays

  ONCE I WAS COOL

  It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD

  This is kind of about you

  This is kind of about me

  We just kind of lost our way

  But we were looking to be free

  —PJ HARVEY

  CONTENTS

  Stop Reading and Listen

  Totally Not Ethical

  Channel B

  Under Your Feet They Go On Growing

  Kick MS

  It Seems Our Time Has Run Out, Dr. Jones

  The Domino Effect

  Wake the Goddamn World

  The Right Kind of Water

  The Walls Would Be Rubble

  My Daughter Can Read Just Fine

  Juggle What?

  Who Wants the Shot

  Felt Like Something

  A Third of Your Life

  Those Who Were There

  How To Say the Right Thing When There's No Right Thing To Say

  I Bop

  82 Degrees

  The OMG We Have To Write About This Look

  Can I Buy You a Drink?

  We Are Fine

  Dragons So Huge

  The Art of the Excuse

  NICE

  This is Scary and Here I Go

  An Essay About Essays

  A Room of One's Own in the Middle of Everything

  STOP READING AND LISTEN

  1

  JUST AFTER WE ELOPED and just before the housing market crashed, my husband and I bought a condo across the street from the Aragon Ballroom. If you’ve never had the pleasure, the Aragon is a legendary music club on Chicago’s North Side. Take the Red Line to the Lawrence stop in Uptown and it’s the first thing you’ll see: breathtaking (albeit crumbling) Spanish architecture, enormous light-up marquee, the line to get in wrapping into the alley, and ticket scalpers on every corner. Here’s a fun game: find the nearest Chicagoan and ask them to tell you their Aragon story. Most of us1 have one or two or five, and many of them go something like this: “Passed out at Rage Against the Machine,” “Got peed on at Faith No More,” “Broke my arm at Megadeth,” “Lots of dudes whipping their penises around in circles at Butthole Surfers;”2 Profoundly dangerous and/or masochistic crowd surfing and/or mosh pit at kmfdm and/or Deadmau5 and/or Insane Clown Posse, and the classic: “Kicked in the face during Slayer. It was awesome.”

  But there’s more, of course.

  There’s always more.

  So the story(ies) go(es): Capone had underground tunnels running between the Aragon and his favorite bar in Uptown: the Green Mill; good for bootlegging, good for hiding out from the cops, good for those massive secret parties that you always see in movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Back then, the Aragon was a ballroom dance hall housing one of the best orchestras in the country; Sinatra played there, as did Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Lawrence Welk. Tuxedos and semi-formal—expected. The jitterbug—prohibited. In 1958, a fire next door caused extensive damage, and instead of bouncing back to its former Big Band glory, the Aragon became, in quick succession: a roller rink, a boxing arena, and a discot
heque. Then, in the ’70s, it housed these crazy, day-long, drunken, furious monster rock shows, thus earning its current nickname of “The Brawlroom” (ball/brawl—see what they did there?). And that, my friends, brings us roaring into the present: mid-sized rock tours, local Spanish language shows, and the occasional boxing match.

  You can feel the history in this place. It’s peeling off the walls with the paint.

  2

  I don’t know why I bought a condo. The American Dream, I guess. Adulthood. I used the phrase “building equity” a lot, although I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

  3

  I do know why I bought that condo. It was because of Jane’s Addiction. In high school, I was a huge Jane’s Addiction fan—still am, but adult devotion is nothing compared to teenage obsession. Fifteen-year-old me had walls papered in Nothing’s Shocking posters. Fifteen-year-old me brought up Perry Farrell while discussing the great American poets in AP English class. Fifteen-year-old me made out with boys who wore eye makeup.

  Thirty-eight-year-old me drinks Cabernet and plays “I Would For You” on repeat.

  In November 1990, Jane’s Addiction played a somewhat infamous show at the Aragon. At the time, I was a sophomore in high school in small town Southeast Michigan—no way in hell would I have been allowed to go to a concert in Chicago—but I had a sort-of boyfriend who was a few years older (shhhhhh, don’t tell my dad) (hi, Dad!), and he made the four-hour drive to be there in his Ford Escort fueled by pop cans we meticulously collected and turned in to the grocery store for ten cents per. “It was awesome!” he told me the next day, his eyes still glazed from no sleep and the glory of the rock. “Perry Farrell climbed the walls! He was up there on the ceiling like a vampire! Everybody was throwing beer bottles, and smashing chairs, and full-body slamming into each other; it was so totally insane, like somebody must have died! There’s no way somebody didn’t die!”

  “What about the music?” I said.

  He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “That was the music.”

  Fifteen-year-old me didn’t have much experience with live shows.3, 4 I hadn’t felt the high that comes from being there, being part of it—the collective energy of the shared experience. My sort-of boyfriend explained it via Star Trek: “It’s like the Borg—we’re thinking and moving and feeling as one,” which in retrospect is a pretty fucked-up metaphor, what with their mass assimilation and “resistance is futile” and nanoprobes injected into your neck, but at the time?—I totally understood what he meant.

  “You can’t get it unless you’re in it,” he said, and that’s how I wound up in the audience for the first ever Lollapalooza tour. It was August 4th, 1991, a few days before my sixteenth birthday. That summer, I’d been at an eight-week theater program at sleepaway camp—yeah, I said it, sleepaway camp—and for some reason my parents gave me permission to spend the day at the Pink Knob Amphitheater5 in Clarkston, Michigan. I remember bits and pieces, a fast-changing montage of image and sound: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T; Butthole Surfers (no swinging dicks, FYI) and Living Color. Color! Wild clothes. Tattoos and piercings and mohawks, none of which I’d seen before. It rained for a bit; thousands of people danced in the mud. It was the first time I heard Henry Rollins, who performed his set with his back to the crowd, bent at the waist, and singing into a hand-held mic with his head between his knees. When the Violent Femmes played, the entire audience sang along to that part in “Kiss Off” that goes, “and ten, ten, ten, ten for everything, everything, everything!”

  Later, after the sun set over the main stage, people lit bonfires across the lawn, and Jane’s Addiction took the stage. The sort-of boyfriend had splurged for pavilion tickets;6 in my memory I can see the band’s buttons and sweat and guitar strings. The night was warm and perfect. I remember standing on my seat. I remember screaming my head off. I remember dancing and not caring what I looked like while I danced—a freedom I haven’t felt in decades. The song I most wanted to hear, “Summertime Rolls,” was the third one they played that night, and when I heard its lilty, steamy opening bassline, I felt—

  Maybe you’ll think I’m corny as hell, but what I felt was joy.

  This was the one I played over and over, alone in my bedroom on a scratched CD. This was the one I listened to when I fell asleep at night. This was my song—the one that spoke directly to me—and here I was with fifteen thousand people who felt the same way. Fifteen thousand people, all of us singing.

  Me and my girlfriend

  Don’t wear no shoes

  Her nose is painted pepper

  Sunlight

  She loves me

  I mean it’s serious

  As serious can be…

  Fifteen thousand people—fifteen thousand—all sharing the same moment.

  Maybe this essay can share it with you.

  Can you hear it?

  Stop reading and listen.

  4

  I moved to Chicago in 1995 after detours in Boston and Florence, Italy, that were admittedly ill-conceived (why did I go to that college? Why did I go to that country? Why do we do any of the crazy things we do?), but ultimately pretty great insofar as learning about the world and myself—coming of age and whatnot. I was dying to go to the Aragon, to stand inside the place where Perry Farrell had climbed the walls, but I’d only just turned twenty—still a year before I could legally get in. Somewhere during that time, my roommate started dating a guy who lived on the same block of Lawrence Avenue, and long story short: while the two of them hung out, I’d lean against the side wall of the Aragon and listen to the shows.

  Weezer. Ozzy Osbourne. Reverend Horton Heat. Lenny Kravitz. Alanis Morrisette circa Jagged Little Pill.

  It was awesome.

  It was also, as I’ve been told on multiple occasions, stupid. Uptown had a reputation, then and still, for gang activity. It’s also home to support services for many who are mentally ill. Also: lots of bars, which means lots of drunks. So why was a girl like me, young and alone and naive as hell, standing on a street corner in a place like Uptown?7

  I never thought of it as a street corner. I thought of it as a rock concert.

  More often than not, after I turned 21 and started going to shows inside the Aragon, I’d pretend that I smoked so I could go back out. On warm nights—cold ones, too; it’s hot in there and there’s no A/C—they throw open the windows, and the music bleeds into the air. I’d lean against the east side of the club, facing Winthrop, and feel the speakers vibrate through the ground and into my shoes. No one elbowed me in the jaw. No one dumped $2 PBRs down my shirt. Inevitably, I’d stare at the building across the street, with its crumbling yellow brick, its iron balconies, its turret. I want a turret someday, I’d think.

  Two decades and 6.25% financing later, I had that very one.

  5

  Recently, I was doing some work in a coffee shop, and at the next table I overheard a conversation between a young couple and their relator about the condo they’d just viewed. How it was everything they’d dreamed of and more. I wanted to lean over and say, Hi. Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but you know that dreams change, right? And markets—they change, too. And sometimes the developer fucks up the roof to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and when they rig the building’s electricity the wires stretch across your neighbors’ backyard and they try to charge you to rent their air and lawsuitlawsuitlawsuit and yeah, sure, fine, at the beginning you can afford the mortgage on you and your husband’s four jobs, but property taxes go up, and assessments go up, and you have to fix the roof, and you get pregnant, and the market crashes, and maybe you get sick, maybe you have a tumor or some shit, so you and your husband work more—you add more teaching gigs ‘cause that’s what adjuncts do and he signs on to a cubical job that slowly, over eight years, drains him like an I-fucking-V but hey, it’s the American fucking way, right! and you’re so, so lucky to have the jobs and so, so lucky to have the insurance and so,
so lucky to have this beautiful, healthy little kid bouncing off the walls and your poor, kind neighbors downstairs8 are so patient with the bounncing and the banging and the jumping, but still, you’re saying, “Baby, don’t jump,” like nine hundred times a day and is that the parent you thought you’d be? and one time, the time that lives in your memory as The Last Straw, you open the closet door and squirrels jump out and go running around your living room and your kid’s like, yay squirrels! and you’re like omg rabies! and people, as you sit here with your relator talking about dreams and imaginary numbers, my question is this: have you really thought this through? I mean really? Not the “We hooked up, moved in together, got a dog, got married and now we’re supposed to buy a place ‘cause that’s the American Dream” sort of thing, because what if that dream changes? What if that dream is changing, right now, this moment, a plot-point on our historical timeline about privilege and ownership and societal norms and do you really want to buy this condo? I mean, far be it from me in the safety of hindsight to tell you what you should and should not do but man, if I could yell back across time to my younger self, I’d tell her, Honey—

  Rent.9

  6

  But hey—focus on the good, right? Here’s what was good about that condo across the street from the Aragon:

  1) My son was born there.

  2) My neighbors were awesome.

  3) Turret!

  4) Sitting on that balcony, three stories above street level, listening to shows. On warm nights, they throw open the windows and the music, suddenly free of the four walls containing it, explodes into the streets. Makes me think of Pandora’s Box: all that fury and rawness and savagry and hope hitting the air and becoming our breath. God, I loved it out there. Instead of $2 PBRs, I could pour a glass of wine. Instead of taking an elbow to the jaw, I’d eat popsicles with my kid and tell him about the bands.

  “Who’s playing tonight?” he’d ask.

  “Megadeth,” I’d say.

  “Death is a band?”