The Survivors

I do a lot of self-reflection these days. Too much of it actually. I've done more of it in the last 2 years and 8 months than I did in the previous 39+ years. Sometimes, it's exhilarating. Often, it's tedious. I tell them the same stories, draw the same conclusions, and get the same reactions.

It's good to figure something new out. Or at least re-access something old. I thought about love recently - how it feels differently to me now than it did when I was a much younger man. Between the ages of 18 and 25, love felt bigger, stronger, more elusive, and less real. Today and for the last 16 years, it feels more like a product, something inevitable and deserved, the next step in a series of drawn-out processes and strange needless promises.

Is it innocence I long for? Or just plain wonder? Have I grown callous and cynical? No, no, and no. It's just the bigness of love I strive for. Even when love is a lie (or at least a misunderstanding), it's better when it's big and unwieldy - something that makes you write bad poems and hear what you've never heard before in great songs.

It was a song that got me here. Last Saturday, I was driving in my car with its 3/4 working engine and tinny stereo. I was listening to a CD that's followed me around, haphazardly, since the beginning of this decade - Your Favorite Music by Clem Snide. It's a hard batch of songs to listen to, on a bad stereo in a loud car. The songs are quiet and some words are whispered.

I usually skipped the final song on the album - a cover of Ritchie Valens' Donna - for two reasons: 1) the original is pretty perfect; and 2) it seemed a strange choice in covers - a modern band doing a relatively simple slow maudlin song from 40+ years back. I didn't see how ground could be broken. But, tired from a day of driving nowhere, I forgot to eject the CD and the last song began:

I knew a girl and Donna was her name
Since she left me, I've never been the same

Now it's not the cut-and-dried lost love sentiment that got me this time. Those songs are everywhere. It was just the name - Donna. And a thought back to 1983 and 1984 when (and I'm about to get all sappy) I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Donna. We worked together at a fast food restaurant in suburban Philadelphia. And to this day I have no idea why I loved her. She was pretty, but in a plain way. She drove a Comet, which was sort of cool. She laughed at my jokes and listened to what I had to say and said a few things of interest herself. Now that I list the reasons, they seem quite valid. Of course I was painfully shy then. And this love went unrequited and I moved to Minnesota and she went off to college in some rural western Pennsylvania town and we lost touch with each other. It was probably for the best. Her parents were staunch anti-abortionists, paying for the town's one pro-life billboard. Politically, it would have been difficult.

But it didn't matter that nothing was consummated with the girl in the light blue Comet. The memory of that which never happened is good enough, is big enough.

There would be other loves from my more youthful days, most existing in my mind and heart and nowhere else. The only other one I want to write about today is Kate. I don't need to list the reasons for loving her. I need no reminding. She was simply the coolest girl, the baddest ass, the sweetest sugar in all of mid-80s Minneapolis. She dressed in black. She once called Prince "nothing more than a little shit from north Minneapolis." She had long brown hair and sad big eyes. She ran away from home (and came back). She liked Springsteen (and punk).

For a very brief time, Kate and I worked together at the movie theater. And one night after work, we had our only date. January, 1985. Actually, it wasn't exactly a date because it wasn't only us. Another co-worker, Kevin, invited us over to his house for pizza and a movie (on the then-revolutionary VHS tape). Kevin was a strange one - lanky and jovial (unless he was drinking), he worshiped Bruce Springsteen and nothing/nobody else. We got along well, me and Kevin. I tried writing a novel about him.

We picked up a deep dish pizza from the Green Mill, itself an odd choice given that we usually went to this place. From there, Kevin drove to his house and Kate and I followed, in my blue AMC Hornet. The drive from 45th and Drew (where Kate lived; she had to get something) to 40th and Wentworth (where Kevin lived) is a short jaunt across southwest Minneapolis, ten minutes at most. But given that I felt untapped love for the girl next to me made the trip seem like forever. It was snowing, for God's sake.


The rest of the night went like this: We saw the movie - The Survivors, starring Walter Matthau and Robin Williams. We ate the pizza and I may have had some underage beer (Kate was 17, I was 19, Kevin was 27... seems almost criminal now that I think back). Kevin got drunk, and had a screaming fight with his mother, with whom he lived (alone). Kate and I were uncomfortable because of Kevin's drunkenness and anger but we stayed for the end of the movie. Someone in the movie was Russian. I drove Kate home. That drive seemed short. There was no more snow, I made no move, said no words stronger than "good night." We listened to my cassette of Born in the U.S.A.

What's my point in telling this story? Nothing other than the fact that this was my favorite night, of all the nights in my life. That something - the world, the future, music, the universe - seemed big and momentous on that night. Since then, everything has gotten smaller. And truer. But I miss the bigness.

Years later, on the night the first Gulf War started, I called Kate. I still knew her phone number from 1985, a number I had memorized and never before called (come on, Ali!). She had moved to California and back to Minnesota. So had I. She asked how I knew her number (good memory, I said.) She asked how I knew she was back in town (I told her a lie; in truth, I broke a law, or at least breached an ethic.) We talked for two hours that night. Her ex-boyfriend was in the war. She missed northern California. I missed southern California. I didn't like the war. We went on and on, telling histories and I got nowhere close to telling her a word of how I felt. Looking back, I probably didn't want to. We talked one more time after that, for a much shorter time. Then everything big faded to small.

I don't know where Kate is now. Her last name is too common to Google, although someone with her name writes really good short stories, full of lesbian love between college professors. Donna, on the other hand, had an uncommon last name, which I'm sure she's given up to marriage since then. If not, then I'm glad she found work as a Recorder of Deeds.

Back to the Clem Snide song. I felt the "big" in Eef Barzelay's tiny vocal. He was made small by losing Donna. By song's end, the words are still small but they're seeking some kind of redemption, from within the singer. This song would not be the first step in getting Donna back, just a way of making him remember, making her remember him.

So, that's my revelation: I remembered what it felt like when love was big.


(Postscript, added 3 hours later)

I realize that I've conveniently glossed over all of my relationships in the past 16 years and how they relate to what I have to say. But you didn't really want me to talk about that, did you?