Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 21: Joe

Prompt: "A song that features the lyrics 'I'm in love' verbatim"

Selected by Joe

"Your Magic Is Working"

Of Montreal

Satanic Panic in the Attic, 2004

We just needed somewhere to hang out and drink, was the thing. Even after I turned 21, I still preferred drinking at someone's house or apartment or dorm room to going out and spending way too much money at bars. I may have pretended that drinking was an extrovert's game, but my true alcoholic's mind always secretly considered the act of drinking to be insular, contained, private. Hunker down with your friends and kill a case. Around the time when drinking went from being illegal to being legal for me, so the winter of 2009-2010, I was still of this mindset. Fuck bars. I don't have enough money anyway. Let's go to Andrew's apartment.

The apartment was one of the truest examples of a "flophouse" that any of my friends had ever inhabited (unless you count Allison's Kensington abode from the previous summer, but I only made the briefest of cameo appearances there, so I'm not counting it). He and two other dudes (friends-of-friends) lived in a small space situated above a hoarder's "thrift store." The owner of the "thrift store" was also the landlord. The apartment had clearly been converted from a gynecologist's office. The posters that you might typically find in such an office—educational posters, medical posters, general tips about vaginal upkeep, that sort of thing—still adorned the walls. It was bizarre and it was slightly unsettling and it was perfect.

This was the dead of winter when Andrew and his two roommates lived there, and yet the landlord didn't provide heat. Or the heater was broken, or something. I don't know. The story is half lost in the sands of time and half unreliable due to the fact that we heard it from our pal who was just beginning his journey off the deep end (resurfacing many years later, thankfully, but still). The main point is that it was cold as shit in there. See-your-breath cold, inside. There was a space heater, but c'mon. There was plenty of booze to warm the gills, but c'mon. We gathered friends and kept warm like alcoholic penguins, but c'mon.

You were also allowed to smoke in there, and I'm pretty sure that all three housemates were regular smokers. Not that this is necessarily strange in this kind of context (e.g. I already linked to Allison's cigarette prompt), but it was strange for me. Too much smoke, if I'm being honest. But I guess it kind of kept us warm? Or at least we pretended to be warm, as we huddled in winter jackets and cupped hands around Gold & Milds.

I've written a lot—too much, most likely—about the innocence of drinking in the woods as teenagers, but the drinking became less cute as we entered our 20s. Still relatively innocent, I'd argue, but the edges of the innocence started to curl slightly in mildly sinister ways. I look back on the nights at Andrew's apartment fondly, but in retrospect, I can see some of the signs of darkness begin to creep in for me and for our group of friends. Maybe it was the frigid atmosphere, I don't know.

Lots of good times too, of course. Always is with this crew. This was the time and location of the infamous Joe v. Mike fistfight over whether jeans with "stylish" holes in them are okay to wear if the jeans were on sale, which we still laugh about to this day (the picture of the fight is floating around the internet somewhere—note that we have our winter jackets on). I remember making plans for this very blog in that apartment (still fun, even if Review Week was a failure). And, not that we spent a ton of timing hanging out with the roommates, whom we didn't really know all that well, but I remember the one dude having a nice vinyl collection, and I remember very clearly hearing Satanic Panic in the Attic for the first time at that apartment. I usually find myself thinking about the old place whenever I hear that album, even today.

But still, maybe you could also consider this the beginning of the end, as far as my own personal drinking habit is concerned. I won't speak for anyone else, even those friends whose own substance abuse and recovery stories are a lot more clear-cut and heroic than mine. I know for me, hanging out at that apartment, however many times we did (which couldn't have been a ton, all things considered), it was the point when the "too much" of it all started to take a shape and a form.

There was one time when I convinced Andrew to attend a party with me about eight blocks away from the apartment. We pregamed at his place. The pregame was whisky and ginger ale, which probably tells you all you need to know right there, but I'll proceed. I don't think anyone else was there, because the plans for the night were too weird and uncomfortable. Plus, it was snowing. But me and Andrew huddled in the cold apartment and shot the shit, like always, and downed a healthy amount of liquor. The party was something that I had heard about from my younger coworkers at the Laf, a situation that was almost too strange to believe. Apparently some rich kid in the Northeast had parents who owned an art gallery, and he had the keys, and he was throwing underage parties in this art gallery, which wasn't even really an art gallery but instead was this huge house in Lawncrest that had been converted, kind of. The kids ("the kids" even though I was 21 and they were only three years younger) were calling it "The Gallery." I was the oldhead at work but I had told the youngins that I wanted to check it out, and so they informed me that a party was happening at the Gallery that night, open invite. I blacked out at Andrew's apartment, is the only problem. Don't remember the walk to the Gallery. Don't really remember much of the Gallery itself, even though I was told the next day by the genial teens I worked with that I had made a fool of myself. Don't really remember much of the night at all. Ended up driving home from Andrew's apartment, in the snow, under these conditions. Not good. Very bad. I woke up in a sweat, not knowing how I had gotten home or if my car was with me or if I had gotten a DUI or what. I didn't. I probably didn't even pass any cars on the road because of the snow, but still: drunk driving in the snow. Not good. I didn't remember much from that night. All I remembered was the apartment. And so you can see how the anxiety and regret and dark pall of alcoholism starts to become associated with such a place.

The other side of the coin is that I loved it, too. Unconditionally, to a fault. The drinking. I loved it and I loved the dumb bullshit like pregaming a kiddie party with whisky gingers or wrestling pals over a dumb arguments or smoking cheap Philly blunts and drinking Lionshead in the deep freeze of Lawndale, Philadelphia. Ask me about the drinking at the time and I would've said something like: "I'm in love." That love persisted for a while, and eventually started to feel like a shackle, a twisted sort of love, a deep and abiding love even when the mask was removed and the true face of drinking was revealed to me, still: love. But I have probably already told that story too many times already.

This isn't the story of me. This is the story of an apartment that we used to hang out in during one winter from our youth. It's the story of how we managed to find warmth in such a cold place, and it's the story about how the cold comes for all of us eventually.