Drive it like you stole it

This Guy I know. His band in Columbus.

Yet again I found myself on Steve’s porch in the middle of the night. That’s not the first place I found myself. Of course I couldn’t get ahold of Kevin when I was supposed to meet up with him for his birthday party, so I drove down to Clintonville and got a PBR at Bourbon Street and pretended to read that pretentious literary journal n+1 that I’ve been trying to get into forever. Boys in bands are loading in, and I turn around and there’s Danielle sitting at a table in the middle of the room, by herself. She’s back from the Amazon, and it seems almost like she never left, but that could possibly be because every time I see her it’s in the dim dirty light of Bourbon Street. We’re talking just as my phone rings wtih a mysterious Columbus area code. Kevin’s at Steve’s. Dave appears carrying an amp. “Are you guys going?” Danielle seems reluctant, and I wonder, did she come to the bar randomly just to sit by herself?

It’s no surprise when we get to Steve’s apartment next door that a bowl is being passed around. Danielle and I sit on the floor at the feet of all those skinny Ohio guys that are always around. Kevin gets me whiskey, or as Steve calls it when he’s drunk (in his booming, yet vaguely effeminate voice) “WHIKKEYY!” It’s always good to see Kevin. We watch an episode of Girls Behaving Badly that Steve has taped off of cable, and he tells us about a controversial episode where one wayward girl seeks revenge on the other by peeing in the kitchen sink. I had no idea this show even existed, and my hopes at one day appearing on it are quickly dashed by the realization that the current cast is comprised of women with records or illegitimate Mexican children.

I met the singer of that band that we ended up seeing in Steve’s kitchen. He’s an eighth grade history teacher, but he’s all shifty-eyed and spazzy when we do shots. He talks about how he occasionally identifies kids who are tripping in class and he close-talks and drinks water loudly in front of their faces to freak them out. Who does acid then goes to history class? Dave and Kevin talk about their first time doing acid, when they somehow ended up laying in Steve’s front yard. Steve’s had one too many bad acid trips, and he swore that if he ever found his friends tripping he would fuck with them. Dave freaked out and tried to play it cool. Kevin forgot the whole thing. This kid with curly hair talked about being tweaked out for days then showing up at parties shouting “I’ve got crack in my socks!”

But the show. The show was great. Dave plays guitar like a Midwesterner; he’s raw and controlled at the same time. The history teacher screamed and jumped around on stage, ran through the audience, bit at his friends’ fingers when they pointed at him from the front row. There was something about that show that made me want to come back to New York and tell everyone here that I have a million friends in a million awesome bands who would probably think that all you all are assholes.

Sitting on Steve’s porch in the middle of the night, just me and him and Danielle, he asks me, “Do you know Danielle? She’s the coolest girl in Columbus.” And I wonder if I could’ve been something like that, had I stuck around.