Spring 1993

We were sitting in the front seat of my dad's pickup truck, just the two of us. We were waiting for my dad to finish saying goodbye to my roommate and my girlfriend. Suddenly she turned to me and said, "You know, I really do love you."

I looked at her and smiled, confused, and said, "that's cool." Why now? Why right before a long drive together? Why not six months before, or any other point at the time we'd known each other? Why, when it was too late to matter anymore? Why, when I'd never see her again?

She and I had first met because I'd thought she was cute and had ingratiated myself to her and her two crazy friends. We'd bonded over a long Columbus Day weekend watching a Ren & Stimpy marathon on Nickolodeon. We'd cemented our new friendship when my roommate had broken her external window over my head during a silly prank and had then had to come up with a plausible lie to tell the RA. Over time, it became less me hanging out with the girls and more just me hanging out with just her.

We'd sit in her dorm room until late at night, talking about her life back in Hawaii, about the tension between all the ethnic groups in her high school, about my own weird high school experience, about the boyfriend she hadn't seen for over six months. About growing up in Anaconda, Montana before her father moved the family to Hawaii — a place famous for its unreasonably tall smokestack and not much else.

Boys loved her. On any given night when we were hanging out, two or three guys would stop by to say hello and flirt. Sometimes we'd all go out for walks together, and she'd grab her two other friends and we'd walk around in the cool Missoula darkness, talking about nothing important. The girls could fill an entire evening complaining about how boring Missoula was compared to Honolulu or Boulder, although the third girl, who'd grown up in Kalispell, didn't have much to add. She was sad by nature, and probably figured that Missoula was a much more exciting place than Kalispell, even though she missed it.

Other times, guys would stop by and find her and I in the middle of a wrestling match or tickle fight. She trusted me, because I never hassled her about her boyfriend. Everyone else did, but I didn't really see the point. Trying to talk someone out of that kind of devotion seemed like a lose-lose situation designed to make her feel bad and make me look bad.

After a while I was just one of the girls, with the four of us getting together to listen to Catherine Wheel and watch Peter Murphy videos and gossip. I knew I was there on sufference, but I was also on good terms with them all, and it wasn't until late that fall that cracks started to develop. I still don't know what happened, but it felt like it wasn't just me and the group, but the three of them also getting a little worn out after dealing with a lot of each other's sassiness and snark. You can only live in a sitcom for so long before reality starts to set in.

A friend of mine came to visit from out of town at the end of the semester. I was getting a cold, and was about to spectacularly fail another set of finals, but as usual, I really didn't care, because my friend was in town and we had some serious catching up to do. I was excited to introduce him to the girls, which happened at the big end-of-the-semester dinner at the cafeteria. The cafeteria food was mostly indifferent, but they made up for it at the end of the semester by laying out a huge "holiday dinner" with several different kinds of dessert. We all loaded up, of course, and somehow, I don't know how, really, she dared my friend to put his finger in her pie. My friend being my friend, he did, and suddenly there was a subtle tension in the air that hadn't been there before. He gave her a feral, challenging grin, she just stared back. She never had much to say about my friend, except that he was a little weird.

When we all got back from winter break, things weren't the same anymore, and I started spending more time with a different group of friends. One of them had gotten a new roommate who had impressed me with her tall, pale, surliness, and she and I had begun to do a little dance that very rapidly got out of control and turned into something else altogether. Before I really knew what was happening, I had a serious girlfriend, who unfortunately was kind of jealous. She was especially jealous of my friend, who I didn't see much as a result. I was sad, but we'd already started to drift apart.

Then came the end of the year, and my dad came to pick me up, and we all got lunch together, and then it was just the two of us sitting in the truck. She'd transferred to the University of Hawaii to be closer to her boyfriend and her family, and her sister, who lived in Eugene, was going to pick her up at my family's house that evening. She'd probably never be back to the University again. I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.

Summer 1991

We were going 120 up I-5 through the Central Valley and I was beginning to get worried about my hair. There were four of us in the little Golf GTI, it was about 95 out, and the car had no air conditioning. We had rolled down the windows to deal with the heat, and even though I had my waist-length hair in a ponytail, it was beginning to turn into an impenetrable rats' nest I was afraid I'd never be able to untangle. The Ventures were blasting the Hawaii Five-O theme song out of the stereo for the thousandth time, and the wind was roaring through the car.

We were heading home from San Francisco. We'd been down there to see the first Lollapalooza. The drive down from Portland had been long and exhausting, and one of us had not exactly been forthcoming with her parents about what she was doing over the weekend, so we had to get her home no later than 10. Another friend, who was terrifying behind the wheel, had promised to get us there in time if the other three of us watched for cops on the drive. The fourth person in the car was its owner, and she was game.

It seemed beyond the powers of reason that we'd be able to see cops with radar guns in time, especially given that we were squinting heavily against the rush of the wind, but sure enough, we saw two patrol cars on overpasses far off in the distance and slowed down in plenty of time. My friend drove like a suicidal meth head (which, at some time in the past, he'd more or less been), but he was blithely self-confident and very, very lucky. The Ventures faded into the Dead Kennedys faded into the Crucifucks, and sometime around dusk we crossed the Oregon border and started looking for dinner.

It had been an epic weekend, full of partying, music, loads of freaks, and shopping. We were still buzzing, both from the high of a weekend perfectly executed, and also nervousness at our headlong pace up I-5. Now our friend the driver told us he knew of a good Thai restaurant in Grants Pass, and we took the exit and drove through town. We were dubious about finding food in Southern Oregon that wasn't horrible, but our friend's strange luck held, and we pulled into the parking lot of a tiny, homey restaurant with a red-painted wood facade and wholesome American decorations.

The food was amazing and we were starving, so dinner was over almost before it started. It seemed odd that the four of us, two boys and two girls, could be sitting so companionably around a table with no romantic entanglements or tension, but reassuring at the same time. Not everything could be reduced to a simple calculus of desire and negotiation, at least not at that time or place. We'd all been friends since high school, but we'd bonded for the weekend into something more meaningful, if not durable. We'd all done a bunch of stuff we weren't supposed to be doing, and it felt good.

It was getting dark when we hit the road again, and we were running late. I mumbled something about being hauled off to jail for reckless endangerment as we hit the freeway, but my friend just laughed and pulled into the left lane. He was pushing the as hard as the car would go, and we were all getting a little nervous. Traffic was heavier than it had been, and he frequently had to flash the brights at cars obdurately parked in the left lane as we'd zoom up behind them at close to twice their speed, impatiently riding their bumpers until they pulled over into the right lane.

By the time we hauled through Salem, the car was silent with barely-suppressed tension. I think the driver sensed that, and also figured that his luck was bound to run out in the heavily-populated corridor between Salem and Portland, because he finally pulled the speed down to a relatively reasonable 80. I was worried about being ridiculed by my father if we got hauled off to jail, the car's owner was worrying about her poor baby, and the other girl was worrying about whether her lies would be plausible enough for her authoritarian, protective mother. The windows had been rolled up, the stereo turned off, and the car glided through the glossy suburban dark. It had been a fun weekend, but it was over.

Autumn 1987

I was young enough that the start of the school year was still exciting. Anything could happen. I'd spent the summer doing yardwork to save up for a Sharp programmable scientific calculator you could program in BASIC, and the summer spent mowing huge lawns, weeding, and hauling wheelbarrows around had left me a short, wiry kid. I was starting the year with no friends but a vague sense that things were going to be better this year. I was taking chemistry, American Studies, Russian, health, advanced algebra, and band.

My high school's band was rivaled only by the football team for sheer uselessness. By my sophomore year, the band had 13 members. All of the students with musical ambition went to the other west side high school, which had an enormous and well-funded program. As a result, our band was a hodgepodge of students whose minds were on other things, studded with a couple big fish in a small pond. The band's drummer ended up being one of Portland's biggest DJs and the drummer for the Dandy Warhols, although he was a mostly silent and often absent presence in class.

I'd stuck with band mostly because the teacher had used every ounce of her charm to keep the flightier members from leaving at the end of the previous year, but had decided to switch to zero period class instead of using one of my normal class periods. This meant that I had to be at school by 7:15 every morning. Given that I stayed up every night as late as I could, reading science fiction or playing with my family's newly-purchased PC, I was generally surly and barely coherent when I stumbled into the cavernous, tiered practice space each morning.

The band had several configurations. We were the pit orchestra for musicals. We were a jazz band, which only performed at assemblies. We were, theoretically, a marching band. And, most prominently and miserably, we were also the pep band, which required us to go to a certain number of our high school's football games and fitfully play excerpts from Sousa marches to accompany our team's inevitable, mechanistic slaughter on the field. Almost all of us hated pep band duty because Portland in the fall is cold, wet, and miserable, our school spirit was lacking, and the students who came to watch the games mocked us and threw pennies at us. Our teacher, who really just wanted to be our friend and have a good time had to get increasingly unpleasant to get us to show up, eventually threatening to fail anyone who skipped a game.

The first game of the year was somewhere between a party and a wake: a decent percentage of the student body showed up, were treated to an utterly hamfisted display of sporting uselessness, and then a DJ from the student body government played a bizarre mixture of top 40 pop and something approaching punk. An indeterminate, tiny percentage of the crowd sneaked away during the game to the asphalt-paved area beneath the bleachers to suck down highly illicit beers, and an even smaller percentage sneaked off to smoke one-hit pipes and expertly-rolled joints. I was too far outside any cliques to know about any of that until much later. It wouldn't have made any difference, because I was deeply threatened by drugs and drug culture, having already lost a couple friends to heroin addiction, but more to the point I was stuck on the bleachers, staring at the clip-on music holder on my clarinet, counting down minutes and waiting for the game to be over, so I could go home.

I'd recently started to befriend one of my fellow students. She was flighty to the point of mania, was short and dark and captured the attention of all the boys who talked to her. At the beginning of the year, she had decided her new name was going to be Ocean, only to decide in the second week of classes it was actually Matisse. I was shy and very tentative about making new friends, but she was enthusiastic and very open with me, so I attached myself to her with a certain kind of vulnerable, intense ferocity.

Even though she lived on the other side of town, she'd come to the game and kept me company, and I met up with her after I'd gotten rid of my clarinet after the game's protracted, inevitable conclusion. The DJ was starting to get warmed up. He'd been going through the staples (Huey Lewis, Steve Winwood) and was gradually warming up (The Outfield, Bruce Springsteen). The two of us talked about our classes, and she kept interjecting about which of the guys wandering by were cute. I could feel the conversation shifting out from under me, and had no idea how to get back onto solid ground.

Just then the DJ put on Violent Femmes' "Add It Up", and the crowd of kids dissolved into a furiously dancing chaos. Flannel and rugby-shirt clad torsos were seemingly everywhere at once, and a few kids even skanked. Or at least that's how I remember it; I'm not sure I started listening to Violent Femmes until later that year, and that seems like a pretty risky choice for a high school party DJ. The only thing I remember with any certain clarity was the shining face of my new friend as she completely abandoned herself to dancing. For a few moments, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Winter 1996

They'd asked me to come out to Missoula the previous autumn, but after the breakup, it seemed wise to give myself time before coming back to town. They understood. They were my friends, and we'd thrown a lot of parties together. Now it was January, and they'd offered to buy me a plane ticket if I'd come out. All I had to do was pack up my records and do my thing at the party. I missed them and I missed Missoula, so I was grateful to them for picking up the tab. DJing was never about the money.

A pair of them picked me up at the airport. I was almost pathetically happy to see them; this was the first contact I'd had with Missoula since I'd left the previous August. Our scene was a small, tight one, and these were people who had gotten involved with it because they liked me and what I was doing. I was grateful for their support and friendship, especially when so much else that connected me to Missoula had dissolved.

The party was the following night at the American Legion Hall, and we discussed logistics and gossiped as we ate chain diner food at Perkins. More of our friends showed up at the diner, including a couple people I'd only known glancingly while I lived there. The conversation was quick, sharp, acerbic: we were all city kids who had come to Missoula because we liked the slower pace of life in Missoula; throwing raves was our way of speeding things up.

They drove me back to their house, where there were more people and more conversations. One of the residents was studying science at his parents' behest, but he really wanted to be a cook; he insisted on making something to share with me, and improvised with pasta and finely chopped onions. It was simple and incredibly good, in the way all of his cooking was, and he talked to me, in his sidelong, shy way, as he worked. A few of us stayed up late, talking and playing video games, until everyone finally drifted off and I passed out on the couch.

The next morning dawned clear and brutally cold. As we walked out to the car to go to breakfast, one of my friends said that even without windchill it had been 30 degrees below zero the night before. My nostrils had frozen solid immediately upon stepping outside, and the skin across my face was a taut mask. It wasn't hard to believe my friend. I could see faint sundogs when I looked towards the sun, two faint haloes preceding and following the distant spot of brightness. I felt proud to have lived in such an unforgiving environment, and wondered what my new friends in San Francisco would make of it.

Breakfast was more of the same: a steady stream of low-key, biting wit, casual planning, and chance encounters with friends. Nothing happened in any particular hurry. Afterwards came the only real work of the day, setting up speakers, taping down cords, checking the sound system, covering the walls in black sheets of PVC. It was a familiar routine, and helping out allowed me to talk to more old friends I hadn't seen yet. I was an out of town guest, now, so I wasn't really expected to do much, but I was too attached to the rituals involved with getting ready for a party to let it go. One of the last things I did was set up the borrowed DAT recorder, so I could get a high-quality recording of the evening's sets.

The afternoon and evening were consumed by more pre-party rituals: sorting records, mentally roughing out set lists, discussing the order of the DJs. Because I was the guest, I was given the penultimate, peak-hour slot, and one of my friends let me borrow one of his most prized records, a white label that was as close to the perfect record that either of us had heard. I looked at him wide-eyed as he handed it to me, somewhat confused as to whether he was loaning it to me or giving it to me, but astonished and embarrassed by the gesture either way. Nobody would have ever done that for me in San Francisco, which prided itself so heavily on the egalitarian spirit of its scene.

The party was slow to get going, as all Missoula parties were. The first DJ worked to a mostly empty room, playing a frankly bizarre mixture of heavy dancefloor techno and freaky, twitchy music that would have been tricky to dance to at the best of times. I thought it was perfect, even if his mixing was pretty rough-hewn. By the time the second DJ, the friend who had loaned me his record, went on, the place was beginning to fill up, and the music was loud enough that I was mostly reduced to smiling and hugging friends rather than talking.

By the time it was time for me to take the decks, the air was thick with sweat and heat. I was dressed for the outside weather, so I stripped down as far as I could, to a thin white T-shirt, my heavy wool pants, and socks. When my friend handed the headphones over to me, an enormous cheer went up from the crowd: enthusiasm for my friend, a welcome for me, happiness to just be there. It didn't matter. I was overpowered by emotion and nerves, and my hands were shaking so badly that I had trouble getting them on the faders.

The set itself followed in a blur. Put a record down, match the beats, wait for the cue point, mix the new record in, cut the old record out, fade back and forth, drop the EQs, backspin and fade, pull the old record off; repeat. I was playing for an audience of friends who'd had over a year to get used to my eccentric tastes and quirky mixing style; everyone was having fun, and the crowd was exuberant and noisy. Nobody seemed to notice or care when I made a mistake, not even the two or three members of the audience who stood in front of the DJ stand intently watching me mix, nodding their heads to the beat. Every so often, one of my friends would worm up through the gyrating crowd and point at the currently playing record and give me a huge, enthusiastic grin. My friend's record got the same enormous reaction it always did. It seemed as if almost no time had passed when the next DJ came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

I was completely soaked through when I stepped down from the stage. All I really wanted to do was sit down and drink some water. As I walked to the back of the dancefloor, two gorgeous young women came up to me, hugged me, and gave me radiant smiles. "We're so glad you came back!" one of them said, "That was amazing!" I was amazed too. I was sure I'd never seen either of them before.

Later, I sat alone in the corner, tilted back in one of the Legion Hall's uncomfortable, upholstered chairs, my hair stuck flat to my forehead with sweat, half-moons of sweat under my armpits, my bare feet gripping the edge of the table in front of me. I was tired and coming down. I was taking a long pull off a bottle of water when she walked by with her new boyfriend. We only made eye contact for a moment. She'd let her hair grow out, something she'd never done while we were together. It looked good, and I had a sudden impulse to motion her over and tell her I liked her new look. Her boyfriend didn't even notice me, though, and she walked away without a backwards glance.

It was starting to get light out by the time we finally chased the last stragglers out of the hall, and cleanup was like a painfully slow reversed film of setting up. People were coming off their highs, we were all exhausted, and some idiots had tagged the bathroom again. We were all ready for sleep by the time we got back to the house.

As we were all waking up, sometime after noon, one of my friends put a CD on the stereo. We all talked very slowly, putting together our sentences with care. We were deliberating over our brunches and listening to the CD, which was playing a song which had unexpectedly changed from a pounding, monotonous rhythm to a pure, ethereal, heartbreaking wash of sound. "What is this?" I burst out. My friend laughed. "I don't know! It's one of yours!"