It was Theo who bought the tickets. A year in advance, and even though his son shares a name with Theo (Big Theo, Little Theo) and even though the two shared serious times - beginning on a rooftop over manhattan, learning the city together, carving the sculpture of themselves, with these songs as a giant chunk of the soundtrack, he offered "Big Theo" a simple, if borderline-thrilled, yes.
The prediction was not for an intricate emotional breakdown. That part comes later.
They meet up on 69th and 5th. He feels his look is overly preppy in a red plaid shirt - more sailing in coastal Connecticut than stoned in a Portland coffee bar next door to the Kill Rock Stars office, but we have little control over our own narrative. He offers this last bit up to himself as a all-a-part-of-life (read: empty) rationalization. He waves to Theo across 5th Avenue. The wave, he realizes, comes across like arms raised in victory. Energy creeping up, he should eat something. They hug. They're excited, waiting for two other friends of Theo's who were once all in the same crowd with him and periodically cross paths through work. Good guys. Not good friends of his. He drags Theo back to a place off Madison where he spied a roasted vegetable sandwich and, as he gulps it down, he wonders if this is really where it all has come down to: a slightly fey red button down and roasted vegetables. Then Theo plays a joke at the expense of the empty sandwich shop and yells Give me all your money! A quick burst of fear gives leave to a sigh, eyes being rolled. Not at all amusing to the employees who have worked hard all day and just want to get the fuck out of there. Hilarious to the culprits and immediately gives them the feeling of a duo reunited.
The small talk with the other two friends is comfortable, if somewhat irrelevant as they all pop through the gate, stand in the beer line. Summer Stage, Central Park, the first stretch of Fall. He notices that City Winery has a stand there. Wine at a Pavement show. Probably a selection of cheese too. He knows that the world, or maybe simply his world, has gone stale. Middle of the road. Middle age. But he has to admit, goddamnit, that he would love a dry red, with a hint of black pepper and a nose of leather, and what yuppie dad from Park Slope doesn't like a humboldt fog cheese, maybe a Hudson Valley manchego. That's the problem. He loves wine and cheese. He sits at home and drinks wine and listens to music tougher than Pavement. He wonders when he started questioning his likes, his looks (well, always), and his choices with such a sharp red pen. He says outloud, Well, Christ, I like cheese, before realizing his group is discussing one of the member's recent weddings, to which he was not invited, nor wanted to be invited.
They smoke more from pipes and sip more from cans and flasks.
And, then, the time is now. The stage darkens and the roar of decades sounds out like a steamship approaching through a dense curtain of memory. This band. This band. First, the downside, and he knew this was coming as he is overly and acutely neurotic: this band comes out on the stage, and the cliche is real: they are older. We are old. He is old. Spiral Stairs, covering his recent baldness with a newsboy cap and dressed and shaped like a 50-something guitarist for a bar blues band, standing insecurely stage right (is this true? Is this simply his own insecurity taking center stage). Steven Malkamus, once the overly bored intellect, songwriting Jesus, the true sufferer of no fools, now openly bathing in the spotlight of his long heralded, globally influential (on an indie level), masterminded expedition of taste and sound, singing the lyrics unchanged from decades ago. He's talking to the crowd. He's trying (too?) hard. So unlike him. Only The Screamer looks perfectly in place, unchanged, unhinged still.
He has seen Pavement, in their prime, twice, but his formative experiences with them are stereo-based, years of slanted living rooms with open windows and private air guitar visions. Apart from sly, sonic, shimmering and shivering beauty, Pavement was, to him, a raw antidote to all the things he wished to become but simply might not make it there. He decides to close his eyes.
And then, all at once, he is torn to shreds by the bear of memory.
It wasn't until the second song came through the haze, a deep, serious float made of an army of bumble bees that he realizes that he is unprepared for the chaos of emotion that has planned, all along, to take complete control of his mind. His heart. He is transported. He first knows - he knows this - that Theo deserves a better friend than him. Out of nowhere, he turns back and embraces Theo. It is borderline pathetic. But Theo, as he always has, understands. It makes him feel wonderful. And undeserving. But there they are, the wind is picking up and the wind is glorious. He realizes that the wind is not wind at all but, instead, his 20s. Not the recent 'before we had kids' daydreams that come out in conversation here and there. It is a real, serious reverie. A reach back to something he can barely even imagine. He knows every song. Every word of every song, except the few lyrics that are simply unknowable. He is then transported back to the arms of an old girlfriend. It's not even a song they listened together. It was a song he listened to while he was just thinking about her. And all of that energy and lack of confidence and longing and the unknown future and the feeling that everything is temporary and the simplicity of their failed relationship comes and entirely, completely, incredibly blows him away. His mind is blown. And he is in love with the feeling. To try and hold it and reason with it isn't possible, nor is it the point. he knows this. He doesn't want to own it. But he feels it deeply, awesomely. He believes himself to be insanely happy. The happiness grows into euphoria. Song by song, the feeling is thrown at him like cocaine fireballs that are warm to the touch. His stance is wide and his head is buried in the velvet-fisted beat of dueling guitar, shriek and whisper voice, and the uniquely scattered drum - always just perfectly behind the beat. He sees years form into solids and friends and times and, Jesus, he's getting emotional again. He's having a mid life crisis. He is spiraling, rattled. He rocks to an encore so intensely that he falters and stumbles. A favorite song - they are all favorite songs - comes to him out of the air like a bomb being dropped from his younger self. Psychodelic Explosion. It is incredible. He could fall on his face. It is chaos. The real thing. Of the soul.
------
And yet he is home by 11:30. He gently kisses his wife before collapsing into bed beside her warmth. The next morning he has a decently slight hangover. Nothing too bad. He plays songs from a seminal album on the family ipod for his two sons who gleefully jump on the couch to the same tune that, hours before, had brought him to his knees in existential fervor.
He thinks about the show, and the visions from the show, and the sounds from the show, for days, unable to move on. The cliche, again, is real: he is filled with emotion.
He needs to write it. And then turn 40. And here he is.
Frontwards.
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