Just an FYI, today’s piece isn’t a pick-me-up, peppy-funny piece. So read at your own risk. Normal broadcasting will return soon.
Sometimes I am so damned coldhearted. My inability to cry honestly concerns me sometimes. I'm feel callous. It’s not that I’ve never cried; I remember when I was young, I cried at my grandpa’s funeral, but not until my dad took me up to the coffin to say goodbye. It was the first funeral that I really remember and I haven’t cried at any funeral since. I cried when I had to put my cat to sleep last year. That completely shocked me. I hadn’t cried at my grandma’s funeral, but my cat dying knocked me out. I felt like a freak. I don’t know that I’ve cried since then. I’m a very emotional person in almost every other aspect that I can imagine, but I very rarely feel tears in my eyes.
So I was caught off guard this morning.
Driving in my car, I heard the deejay talking about a concert that was coming to town: The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now, The Red Hot Chili Peppers hold an oddly sentimental place in my heart, because of their influence on my college years.
When I got to college, I was a somewhat sheltered young man, musically and socially. But in my first month there, I met a guy named Morrie who was cool in the way that cool people envied. He had the attitude and the charm to convince people of things. And he had an ear for music like nobody I’ve ever known. We became fast friends and ended up rooming together.
When I say Morrie knew music, I mean that when I moved in with him and looked at his music collection, I saw stuff that I’d never heard of. Which, given my anemic musical sense, probably meant it was respectable. He loved hard, pounding music. Heavy bass. Which was not popular. At all.
Yet.
He had what sounded like a demo CD from a band called Nirvana. This was a couple of years before Nevermind came out. He had Pretty Hate Machine, by a band that, for the longest time, I thought was called NIN. He had a yellow and black CD with a crazy headbanger on the front that I actually liked a lot, by a band called Soundgarden. It said Louder Than Love and it was. He had the Cult and Mudhoney and the Cure and Henry Rollins and on and on.
As we continued to unpack, one of the last things that he got out to put in our room was an approximately five foot by three foot poster of four guys with their arms crossed wearing nothing but socks. And not on their feet.
“Fuckin-A” said Morrie.
“Fuckin-A” I agreed.
We went on to have quite a few bizarre adventures, which I am sure I’ll get around to writing about someday. But there was one thing that I didn’t do with him that I still think about to this day. I didn’t go with him to a Chili Peppers concert in Omaha. He loved the Chili Peppers. He’d been to many of their concerts before and told me I had to go to this one. I didn’t – mostly because it was about four hours away and it’d be a long-ass concert. They had two opening acts that nobody had ever heard of and I really didn’t want to sit through all of that. The first opening act was Smashing Pumpkins. The second was Pearl Jam. He said it was one of the best concerts he’d seen.
Morrie and I were close all the way through college. We shared joy and difficulty and on one occasion, a girlfriend. People said we shared a brain. Not a day went by that someone didn’t ask me where Morrie was, as if I could mentally triangulate his global position. He was married and divorced before he graduated college. It was a hard time for him. I had moved away by the end of it, but he came to Atlanta to visit me and he bared his soul about the pain of watching a marriage die.
A short time later, he found himself with a woman that he truly loved. He had graduated now with a degree in education, but he couldn’t find a decent teaching position. And then she became pregnant. They got married, but he later told me that an overwhelming sense of fear and dread came over him. He wanted to provide. He wanted to take care of this woman and the baby that he had always longed to have. He knew of only one job that could instantly get him the insurance and stability that he needed. The United States Army. He is still in today.
So when I heard a few bars of the Chili Peppers’ By The Way this morning, I thought of Morrie. And I thought of how we would stay up until 4:00 in the morning talking about how we hoped our lives would play out. And I thought of running around campus with nothing but a sock on. And I thought of lying in a park, drunk, at midnight, talking about how great life was. And I thought of the dangerous, crazed stunts we’d deftly executed together, celebrating just being young. And I thought of the times he’d laugh so hard at something I did or said that he would double over and fall to the floor and cry and swear and tell me to stop. And I thought of his marriage and divorce and remarriage. And I thought of his kids. And I thought of how the last time I talked to him on the phone, he told me he loved me. And I thought of how I told him the same thing. And I thought of him going to fight in a war. And I thought of the possibility of someday getting a call that told me he’d been killed. And I thought about how I don’t think I could ever function again as a human being if that happened.
And I cried.
I won’t be going to the concert.
