Once I Was Cool Read online

“The Flaming Lips,” I’d say.

  “We don’t lick the stove.”

  “The Pixies,” I’d say.

  “Pixies have glitter dust in their butts.”

  On that balcony, we heard Kim Deal play the opening notes of “Debaser” during the Pixies’ 2009 Doolittle 20th anniversary tour. We heard LCD Soundsystem do “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” We heard Morrissey, Johnny Cash, M.I.A., and a gazillion others.

  7

  During the years we lived across from the Aragon, I stopped being a part of the audience. Instead, I watched them. Up there, I had a front row seat.

  When Rob Zombie played, his crowd refused to leave. They mobbed the street, blocking traffic both ways down Lawrence Avenue, chanting “zombie! zombie!” (I wish they’d been talking about actual zombies. That would’ve been awesome). Some guy who used to play with The Grateful Dead headlined a show, and forgive the generalization, but the whole neighborhood had a contact high. I remember when the show let out at 2 a.m., and we woke up to a wicked ten-guy pile-up in the street. This happened a lot: the fighting and yelling and drunken brawls; the punching and swearing and bloody noses. But this was the first time everyone involved was wearing tie-dye. My husband opened the window and yelled, “Aren’t you guys supposed to love each other?” Kid Rock’s fans backed away when they saw him, parting like the Red Sea as he walked the block from his limo to the front door. President Obama had his 50th birthday party at the Aragon, and the Secret Service wouldn’t let us leave our building. When they filmed the club scene in Public Enemies, they wrapped a chain-link fence around the block to protect Johnny Depp from screaming women. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played, I couldn’t get off the L. When Weezer played, I couldn’t get off Lakeshore Drive. The week I came home from the hospital with my new baby, born three weeks early in the middle of a snowstorm, Marilyn Manson played.

  His audience broke a tree in front of my building.

  They broke a tree.10

  8

  I’m interested in audience. How we come together, feel the high of being there. For years, I wrote mainly for live performance; specifically, live performance in bars. The audience is right there. So is the laughter, the gasps, and blank faces if I’ve lost them. When I sit down to write, that’s what I’m imagining: the connection, the energy, and the collective electricity of joy or shock or empathy.

  The essay was first named by Michel de Montaigne as “Essais,” which means “attempts.” I like that—an attempt. Here’s my attempt to try out an idea. Here’s my attempt to figure out what I think. Here’s my attempt to show you what I’ve seen, to share that experience with you. Sometimes, those experiences are fun; the wild and the edgy, the young and the stupid and the free.

  But there’s more to the story.

  There’s always more.

  9

  Yelling and fighting at 2 a.m., immediately followed by gunshots. My husband called 9-1-1, and we watched out the window ‘til the sirens came; first police, then fire trucks, then an ambulance. Our bedroom was filled with red and blue light. A small crowd collected on the sidewalk next to the Aragon, and later, we’d find out a teenage boy had died. I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened. I wish I could say it was the last.

  An hour later—quiet now, and dark—I got back into bed and began the tricky, foggy work of talking myself back into sleep. I don’t know how long I was out before the crying started. No, not crying—that word’s too weak; this was a wail. A male voice, wailing. Low and desperate and destroyed, deep at the base of his throat. Maybe at first, I dreamt it, but soon I was sitting up, fully awake, and back to the window.

  Three stories below, the boy’s father stood where his son had been shot. He stood there all morning—3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—and the whole time, he wailed. A single, raw sob; a few of beats of silence; then another. It made me think of contractions—the pause between the pain. My husband and I sat on the bed, wide awake and listening. We sat there in all of our privilege: our newborn son alive and healthy and asleep in his tiny turret bedroom; our safe, warm home; our middle class upbringings and middle class lives, our education and jobs and insurance; our families; our skin color; our faith; all of it so enormous and so puny in the face of all that pain. I considered reaching into the nightstand to grab the little foam earplugs I used sometimes when the Aragon opens its windows because sometimes the noise is too much, the music and the traffic and the violence and the loss. It’s easier to drown it out, to change the channel, to read something else, to believe the same old story, to stick my fingers in my ears and say Lalalalala instead of listening to a grief I couldn’t fathom and the truths in the world that I don’t want to see.

  I sat there, listening.

  I imagined people awake, listening, up and down the block. Awake, listening, all across Uptown. Awake, listening, across the city, maybe the country.

  Are you awake? Can you hear it?

  Stop reading and listen.

  10

  Just after we had a baby and just before we could no longer afford our mortgage, I passed a woman and her daughter standing in front of the Aragon. The mom was in her mid-forties, in Capri pants and a sweatshirt that said GAP. She clutched her purse in both hands and stared up at the Aragon. Her eyes were wide. Her mouth was dropped open. I think she may have gasped. I remembered the first time I saw the Duomo in Florence, or the Fred and Ginger house in Prague, how tiny I felt in the face of all that beauty, all that history—and I looked up at the Aragon, too. I’d been living across from it for nearly three years. It had become part of my every day, and I couldn’t remember the last time I really saw it.

  What a mind-blowingly beautiful building. Mosaic tilework lines the walls, with concrete vines running up to sculpted faces that sometimes smile and sometimes frown. In its day, this place was the most famous dancehall in the country, packing in eighteen thousand people a week. Eighteen thousand. It survived prohibition. It survived the Great Depression. Lawrence Welk played there. So did B.B. King. So did The Doors, The Kinks. And Jane’s Addiction in 1990, when I wasn’t much older than the girl standing next to me on the sidewalk.

  She was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and in that painful, awkward vortex of OMG gross I’m with my mom. Too much foundation over acne scars. Too much Abercrombie & Fitch. Too-huge headphones jutting out like Princess Leia buns. She held an iPhone in front her face—texting, maybe? YouTube?—and was completely oblivious to her mother, the Aragon, me watching the both of them, and all of Uptown surrounding us: people rushing to work, traffic rushing by, colored chalk pictures on the sidewalk, pigeons pooping on every damn thing, the L train thundering above, radios with the bass turned all the way up, dogs and kids and runners and commuters. And three stories above us, in the yellow brick building across the street, my newborn son was fast asleep in his turret.

  The mom nudged her.

  She glanced up.

  The mom spun her fingers by her ears—the universal gesture for take off the goddamn headphones.

  The daughter rolled her eyes, but she did it.

  The mom put one arm around her (puke, OMG gross) and held out the other like she was going to hug the building. “This,” she announced, “is the Aragon Ballroom.” Her voice held a profound sort of awe, as if the Aragon was the Vatican.

  The daughter rolled her eyes again. I’m not sure if the mom noticed; if so, she ignored her, and went on to say the coolest thing in the entire universe.

  “I saw a band play here called Jane’s Addiction.”

  Part of my brain may have exploded.

  She was in her forties, in a GAP logo sweatshirt with helmet hair. In my head, I’d slapped her with every possible generalization: subburbs, tourist, old, out-of-touch, uncool, everything I promised myself I would never become. Not once had I considered that there might be more to her story. That there is always more to our stories. She’d been there! She’d been there, ducking beer bottles and crowdsurfing while Perr
y climbed the walls. I wanted her to describe it, to put me there. I wanted to feel the music vibrate through my shoes.

  But before I had a chance to ask, her daughter said, “Jane’s Addiction? Who’s that?”

  I left before I flogged her.

  11

  Upstairs in my condo, I went into the turret to look in on my napping son. Inside, it’s not a perfect circle. More like a quarter-piece of pie; two flat walls meet at a right-angle connected by a ninety-degree curve. Our friend Kat, an artist, set up her ladders and painted a huge red tree, its leaves and branches twisting to the ceiling and reaching around the circumference of the room, a forest in the middle of the city. I fed my kid in that forest. I wrote there while he slept. I cried there while he cried, in the months following his birth when I lost myself in the fog, and it was there that I found myself, too; listening to him breath and talk and sing and laugh, the best fucking music in the world.

  I put my hand on his sleeping back, feeling it rise and fall. Someday, he might look at me the way that woman’s daughter looked at her, and that’s okay. He might go to rock shoes at the Aragon, ducking beer bottles and climbing the walls, and that’s okay, too. He might read these essays, seeing how I tried and failed and tried again, and, hopefully, how there’s always more to the story: mine and his and yours and yours and yours.

  And on my grave—he’ll know Jane's Addiction.

  On my fucking grave.

  12

  Later that night, I went out onto the balcony and looked across the street at the Aragon’s enormous marquee, A-R-A-G-O-N running vertically top-to-bottom. Often, one or more of the electric neon letters are burnt out, spelling A-G-O-N or A-A-G-O or R-A-G-O-N. The club was dark that night, so the streets belonged to the city instead of a rock show. I was out there for a while, watching it; my front-row seat to so much messy beauty.

  Then I got out my cellphone and called my son’s godfather, my oldest friend, Jeff. “You have to promise,” I said when he picked up. “Promise you’ll tell him that once, I was cool.”

  Footnotes:

  1. I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly two decades. Chicagoans have told me that that’s long enough to call myself a Chicagoan. I think of myself as such, but in the interests of both full disclosure and hometown respect: hold up your right palm; I grew up about a half-inch west of the base of your thumb. Go Blue.

  2. Why, Butthole Surfers? Why?

  3. Unless we count musical theater, which in this case, I am not.

  4. At that point in my life, I’d been to exactly two live concerts: 1) Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling tour with my mom—I remember the band suspended upside down on wires during the finale—and 3) an Indigo Girls show in Royal Oak. It was an outdoor amphitheater, and I was standing in a lovely patch of grass near some tiny, lovely trees—exactly where one should be when one is at an Indigo Girls concert. A very beautiful woman in a flowy skirt and a bikini top came up to me, said, “I love you, pretty girl,” and hugged me. Then she went up to the tree I was standing next to, said, “I love you, pretty tree,” and hugged it.

  5. Apparently DTE Energy acquired the naming rights to Pine Knob in 2002, and it’s now called the DTE Energy Music Theatre. But fuck that noise. Pine Knob is Pine Knob. Comiskey Park is Comiskey Park. The Sears Tower is the Sears Tower. Now get off my lawn.

  6. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t remember how we began or how we ended, and it wasn’t ‘til writing this essay that I fully grasped what that concert meant to me. Thank you, sort-of boyfriend who took me to Lollapalooza. I am profoundly grateful.

  7. I’ve lived and worked and hung out in many different neighborhoods in Chicago. The only time I ever feared for my immediate safety was in Wrigleyville when the bars closed. A guy chased me down the street, yelling that I should stop ‘cause he just wanted to talk to me. Don’t worry, he wasn’t going to rape me or anything. Why wasn’t I stopping? Why wasn’t I fucking stopping?

  8. Dear Katie and Steve: ♥

  9. I’d also tell her to talk less and listen more. And to read bell hooks like a decade sooner.

  10. Marilyn Manson owes me a tree.

  TOTALLY NOT ETHICAL

  RECENTLY, i dropped a bunch of ecstasy and went to the symphony. A couple of lifetimes ago, I did this all the time: sinking down in my seat and wrapping the sound around me like a blanket, timpani dancing in my fingertips, the cello section syncing with my heartbeat. But then, what always happens happened: I got a job, got married, had a kid, and woke up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up.

  What did you do when you realized you were…old?

  I bought a ticket to The Magic Flute, booked a babysitter, and went to my sock drawer, where I’d hid the three little pills of e a friend had given me years before.

  “In case of emergency,” she’d said, as if I were going to Africa, and this ecstasy could fend off Malaria. I swallowed them all in the cab on the way to Symphony Center.

  Have you been to Symphony Center? On Michigan Avenue, down by the Bean? It’s beautiful: rotunda lobby with chandeliers, tons of people dressed in expensive things, women in shiny makeup—as I stared at them, I got hyper aware of the layers of mascara on my eyelashes, like I could see these feather-like things flying in the air when I shut my eyes. It’s crazy. You have to try it. Like, seriously. Shut your eyes. Now open them, slowly. Look at the light, do you see swirls? Like a Fourth of July sparkler?

  That was me in the Symphony lobby: squinting at the chandeliers, trying to see my own eyelashes. And all of a sudden, I heard it: “Megan? Is that you?”

  You’ve seen this moment in a thousand romantic comedies. The main character has food on her face, or has recently vomited, or is peaking on ecstasy, having not done that particular drug for over a decade, and it’s then—at the most inopportune moment—that the last person she’d ever expect to see appears: an ex-boyfriend. An ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. An ex-boyfriend who never really was a boyfriend, just some old guy I slept with a lot; and I probably shouldn’t say old because how old he was then is how old I am now, and I’m not old, right?

  Right?

  I opened my mouth to say his name, and then realized I didn’t remember it. Not his first name, anyway, which is funny ‘cause usually it’s their last names you forget. What I did remember was this: he’d been my professor.

  My ethics professor.

  My ethics professor, with whom I’d had an affair.

  Totally not ethical, but at the moment, I was in the moment; eighteen, and free, desperate to be an adult. My ethics professor was thirty-five, which at the time was so totally old! I mean, not old like Dating Your Grandpa old; old like he’d lived. He was experienced. An intellectual. Technically, he wasn’t really my professor; he was my T.A., but back then, I didn’t know the difference. It was one of those lecture courses where three hundred eighteen-year-olds cram into auditorium seating to listen to someone waaaaaay at the front of the room talk at them for an hour and a half, and then meet later with T.A.’s to actually learn something. This was the guy who listened to us, who knew our names, who graded our papers, and got us all worked up about empirical truths. His thesis was on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and he talked about it with so much passion—pacing the room, pounding desks, scribbling on the blackboard. Also, he wore really tight pants, so whenever he’d turn his back, all the girls in our group would lean into the aisle for a better view.

  Later, in his apartment, after a couple joints, he’d talk just as passionately, except instead of jeans and blazers, he’d be naked, and instead of Kant’s Pure Reason, it was Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door. This was a man who loved Led Zeppelin. He had very involved theories about the philosophical placement of their lyrics, none of which I can remember because I was stoned for the entire duration of our relationship—if you could call it that—and I’m not the kind of stoned that can process complex thought; I’m the kind of stoned that stares at the orange juice
cartons like OMG! Have you ever really looked at one of these? They’re amazing!

  Then I giggle for a half hour and fall asleep.

  After a few months of this, he asked what I was going to do with my life. We were lying on the couch, on top of a sheet. We were always on top of sheets. He’d gotten divorced the year before and had to get new stuff, so he ordered entire rooms straight out of the Pottery Barn catalogue and then refused to take the price tags off.

  It never occurred to me to ask why.

  It never occurred to me to ask a lot of things. For example: Did he read the papers he gave me A’s on? Was I the only student he invited home? Who exactly was the baby in the photos taped to his fridge, that chubby little girl with his same eyes?

  What was I going to do with my life?

  What had he done with his?

  But I didn’t say that. I giggled, as though the question were an orange juice carton.

  “I’m serious,” he said, dragging the joint. “What will you study? How will you live, eat, pay rent?” He didn’t quite sound like a dad, but he certainly didn’t sound like a boyfriend. He sounded like a professor giving a test, as though my dreams were something I needed to list like chapter headings from Immanuel Kant. And suddenly, when I looked at him, I didn’t see that experienced adult.

  I saw a guy with a receding hairline.

  “What I’d like to do—”

  I could’ve said a thousand things in that moment, and all of them would’ve been true. I’d like to travel—Florence and Thailand and Prague. I’d like to write books. I’d like to fall in love a thousand times. Live hard and desperate and full, my pulse pounding like a bass drum. And when I wake up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up, I’d like to be sure in the knowledge that I enjoyed it. Every fucking second.

  “What I’d like to do—” I said again, and he leaned forward, excited. It was the first and last time he ever really listened to me. “I’d like to sing with Led Zeppelin.”

  Then I giggled for a half hour and fell asleep.