like a warm fog, and my eyelids start to get heavy, and I start to feel bad for Her, so I decide it’s time to return Her calls. She answers, and Her voice is filled with genuine relief (“Oh, thank God !”), but that quickly fades when I tell Her where I am. She asks me why I didn’t call, and maybe it’s the Ativan, but I tell Her the truth: I say I’m not really sure why.
I hear Her light up a cigarette on the other end of the phone, breathe out smoke with a gust. There’s silence for a minute, then she asks when I’m coming home, and I say I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. She asks me what I’m going to do about my medication, or my psychiatrist, and I tell Her I haven’t thought about either of them. And that I don’t care. She asks what’s wrong with me, why am I acting like this, and I say I’m not sure. Then she says she has to go to class, and there’s another minute of silence. I tell Her I’m sorry, but she just says, “Yeah,” and hangs up. There’s no I love you, just dead silence. I turn the tap off and walk back into the studio. I leave my phone sitting on the edge of the sink.
Here’s how the next few weeks go: We start working on the album. We learn that while Nirvana recorded a bunch of songs for Nevermind in the studio we’re in, just one actually ended up on the album (“Polly,” in case you were wondering). We are bummed out by this. We take breaks from recording and walk down to Lake Monona, which is still frozen solid. We step out onto the surface,like little kids, and try to slide all the way to downtown. We attempt ice fishing, with little success.
We learn that Madison is a great town, especially if you like aging hippies and date-rapist/frat-guy types. The Animal tries to fight a group of the latter down on State Street. He punches one of them in the eye and it makes a sound like a water balloon bursting. There’s blood on the icy sidewalk. He says the power of Dave Grohl compelled him to do it. We disappear into the night before the cops can show up.
We sleep on some chick’s floor in the University of Wisconsin dorms. We have no money, so we survive on Fritos and Mountain Dew. But none of that matters. The album is humming along—for the first time, I’m getting my lyrics in the songs—and the music sounds big and shiny . . . like the way a real album should sound. We are becoming a real band. It doesn’t matter that the temperature is in the single digits during the day, or that we are surrounded by burned-out professors and drunken bullies. In fact, that makes everything even better . We’re a band of brothers . . . and we’re out here alone, behind enemy lines. We know no one and don’t need to apologize for our actions. We are fighting, we are laughing, we are alive again. Or at least I am.
Because the songs I’m writing now aren’t love songs. They’re hate songs. And they’re all about Her. I want to punish Her for not believing in me or my band, I want Her to know that she hurt me. So I write songs—fantasies, I suppose—that put Her in the worst situationsimaginable. I reveal high school shames and pull skeletons out of the closet. I spill secrets she told me in confidence. My pen is a weapon, and I use it to humiliate Her, to extract a measure of revenge. I don’t use Her name at all, but when she hears these songs, she’ll know exactly who they’re about. It’s awful, writing such terrible things about the person you love, but I’ll take a pen and paper over a psychiatrist’s chair any day of the week. This is my therapy. This has been building in me for a while.
• • •
One night, we’re bored and decide to drive back to Chicago on a whim. Our producer doesn’t think that’s a particularly good idea, especially since it is around 2:00 a.m. and the dead of February in Wisconsin, but we keep pestering him, tell him we need to get a particular guitar, this one with great tone and so on and so on, and eventually he
I hear Her light up a cigarette on the other end of the phone, breathe out smoke with a gust. There’s silence for a minute, then she asks when I’m coming home, and I say I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. She asks me what I’m going to do about my medication, or my psychiatrist, and I tell Her I haven’t thought about either of them. And that I don’t care. She asks what’s wrong with me, why am I acting like this, and I say I’m not sure. Then she says she has to go to class, and there’s another minute of silence. I tell Her I’m sorry, but she just says, “Yeah,” and hangs up. There’s no I love you, just dead silence. I turn the tap off and walk back into the studio. I leave my phone sitting on the edge of the sink.
Here’s how the next few weeks go: We start working on the album. We learn that while Nirvana recorded a bunch of songs for Nevermind in the studio we’re in, just one actually ended up on the album (“Polly,” in case you were wondering). We are bummed out by this. We take breaks from recording and walk down to Lake Monona, which is still frozen solid. We step out onto the surface,like little kids, and try to slide all the way to downtown. We attempt ice fishing, with little success.
We learn that Madison is a great town, especially if you like aging hippies and date-rapist/frat-guy types. The Animal tries to fight a group of the latter down on State Street. He punches one of them in the eye and it makes a sound like a water balloon bursting. There’s blood on the icy sidewalk. He says the power of Dave Grohl compelled him to do it. We disappear into the night before the cops can show up.
We sleep on some chick’s floor in the University of Wisconsin dorms. We have no money, so we survive on Fritos and Mountain Dew. But none of that matters. The album is humming along—for the first time, I’m getting my lyrics in the songs—and the music sounds big and shiny . . . like the way a real album should sound. We are becoming a real band. It doesn’t matter that the temperature is in the single digits during the day, or that we are surrounded by burned-out professors and drunken bullies. In fact, that makes everything even better . We’re a band of brothers . . . and we’re out here alone, behind enemy lines. We know no one and don’t need to apologize for our actions. We are fighting, we are laughing, we are alive again. Or at least I am.
Because the songs I’m writing now aren’t love songs. They’re hate songs. And they’re all about Her. I want to punish Her for not believing in me or my band, I want Her to know that she hurt me. So I write songs—fantasies, I suppose—that put Her in the worst situationsimaginable. I reveal high school shames and pull skeletons out of the closet. I spill secrets she told me in confidence. My pen is a weapon, and I use it to humiliate Her, to extract a measure of revenge. I don’t use Her name at all, but when she hears these songs, she’ll know exactly who they’re about. It’s awful, writing such terrible things about the person you love, but I’ll take a pen and paper over a psychiatrist’s chair any day of the week. This is my therapy. This has been building in me for a while.
• • •
One night, we’re bored and decide to drive back to Chicago on a whim. Our producer doesn’t think that’s a particularly good idea, especially since it is around 2:00 a.m. and the dead of February in Wisconsin, but we keep pestering him, tell him we need to get a particular guitar, this one with great tone and so on and so on, and eventually he
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