Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 138: Joe

Prompt: "A song that reminds you of the worst thing you've ever done"

Selected by Joe

"Haunted"

Spanish Love Songs

No Joy, 2023

I predict plenty of hand-wringing over interpretations of this prompt. We are all flawed humans. We all have skeletons in the closet. Honesty is encouraged in this space but only when that honesty is helpful and not harmful. The worst thing you've ever done?! This isn't the time or the place. In most cases, if there even is an answer, objectively, to that question, then the answer is probably not fit for the blog. Let's not get anyone in any hot water today, alright? Let's instead infer that the prompt is asking us to describe the worst thing that you've ever done that you feel safe writing about. Exhale. Hold it for three seconds. Then breathe in deeply.

I have decided to confess something. I feel safe confessing because the victims of my actions are long gone, and certainly nowhere near the blog, and that I actually don't remember who my co-conspirators were (it's either one friend or another, but I honestly don't know which), and no one was actually harmed, like physically or traumatically. But take all these equivocations and shove 'em in a sack, because this is a confession. I may have told Pam about this but if I have, that's the only person ever, until now. If I haven't told her, then you are getting some pure, raw, uncut confession time here. It's not that great of a story, but I will juice it up as much as I can, for dramatic purposes.

We set the scene. It is early June in the summer of 2007. We are encamped in Ocean City, NJ, for the ritual known as Senior Week. You might be familiar (and not just because this is Song Challenge's second sojourn in this house during this week). Hundreds of kids in one town, all of them underage drinking and acting the fool and trying to capture those last few drops of the high school experience in a bottle to bring to college as a souvenir.

Here is the delicate social strata of my friends in high school, condensed into one brief paragraph. I was friends with one group, the theater kids, and these were the friends with whom I chipped in money to rent a shore house for the week. But I had another group of friends, who were kinda sorta band-adjacent but more so became my friends at that time in my life due to sharing the same third-period lunch table. Those dudes had a house maybe three blocks away. So I split time. And there was tension, as their might typically be when money and breaking the law are concerned, in the idea of visiting other houses. It's one thing to underage drink in your own rental house, but it's another to welcome friends, acquaintances, or even strangers into that house to also underage drink. This has a way of "proving who your true friends are," in a sense. Stuff like: "Hey, I don't mind this kid, but my roommate feels uncomfortable when he's there because he gets a little too sauced" and that kind of thing. No one wants any trouble.

All that kind of shit rubbed me the wrong way. I have always been of the mindset of "the more the merrier." I like parties when different groups of folks come together. I like the idea of "worlds colliding." I think that it makes life interesting. And it's also good practice in focusing on the good in your fellow human beings. Optimism. Sure, he's a bit of a mess, and sure, he broke up with your cousin's classmate in a bad way, but I think there's some good in him, ya know? He should be at this party. And so on.

So if I feel that way, then I also expect it to work the other way around. I know it doesn't, but this is just the fucked-up projecting that my mind pulls. I've never been known to deny someone entry to my parties, so why would someone wanna kick me out of theirs? As I'm typing it now, I'm starting to wonder if this wasn't some sort of defense mechanism for myself. I.e. I want to go to the party and the only way to prove that I'm worthy of that party is to have my own parties and invite everyone. It's harder for them to be the bad guy if I try to be the good guy. Something like that.

I'm being too vague. Here are specifics. There was a house in walking distance with friends-of-friends. There were hundreds of houses in walking distance with friends-of-friends, but I'm referring to one specific house, where I want to say girls from Gwynedd Mercy Academy were staying. They were not theater girls (I know this because the GMA theater girls were my roommates that week), but I don't know the connection otherwise. Friends of friends! A guy who was also staying at our shore house was I think the friend-of, or maybe him and the girls we were staying with? I don't know. I sincerely don't remember any such details. But I know we were at this house multiple times that week.

I'm not saying I was the paradigm of kindness and gentleness during the hours I was at that house. I was more likely pretty drunk, maybe hooked up with a couple of the girls, or maybe just chilled in the corner all dinosaur-armed and eyes half-closed. I know for sure that I didn't cause any mayhem, no drama, anything like that. I wasn't even stealing their beer! I had my own! What it probably was was that, later in the week, I had brought a couple other friends from that third-period-lunch shore house, and maybe friends-of-friends-of-friends was too much of a stretch for the people who lived there. So we were kicked out.

They weren't that nice about it either. Not that they had an obligation to be, but still, I think talking to me eye-to-eye and saying "hey, this is too much, do you mind leaving for a bit, and then we'll hit you up if it's cool to come back" might've softened the blow. I understood the pressures of being on the hook for crimes of this nature happening on property that you were responsible for. I did not understand the need to be a prick to someone who just wanted to party. It hurt. I was upset and I was pissed and I felt like I needed to do something drastic.

So I called the police.

Which is just so fucked up for so many reasons. Morally, I don't agree with the idea that the police should be inserting themselves into safe situations for the purposes of collecting money. I think it's fucked up that the police would be concerned about collecting money in the first place, but they are, especially down the shore, when they know that kids are out there committing the common petty crime of consuming alcohol, and all they need is the slightest go ahead to corner them and cite them and then collect money from them, all in the name of "safety," when it wasn't a public safety concern in the first place. Among the myriad of ideas that cause me to say now and say always ACAB, this is one of them, and it was an extremely important one to me at that age.

To turn around and then forgo my morals in this regard by using the cops to inflict harm on others, kids like me, kids that didn't do anything to deserve citations and loss of personal funds and being made to feel small at the hands of the Ocean City oppressors, to sic 'em on those kids was fucked up. Real fucked up. I regretted it the next morning, and I regret it now, and I think that I waited to so long to admit that I did this because I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression of me, that I am that type of person. I was in that moment, though. This is a safe space for me, here on this blog, with you people, and so I am less concerned that there will be any misunderstanding here, that someone will mistakenly think that I'm a bootlicker all the time and that I'm consistently so vindictive that I would stoop this low normally. I am describing this as the exception to the rule. It still happened.

But there you go. I did a shitty thing. I kept a straight face the next day when some of the kids who were there at the house when the OCPD had showed up brought their fresh citations to the boardwalk, while they openly wondered why the fuck the police where there in the first place. I didn't follow up with anyone after that week about this incident (or, in many cases, about anything at all). Having experienced the underage drinking citation merry-go-round a few times myself back in the day, I assume they paid a fee and had it dropped from their permanent record eventually and all that. I don't think I ruined any lives. Which doesn't make it any less wrong, I'm just saying.

I'll also admit here that I chose the song here because I could totally see if having some opaque emotional connections to this story, I wanted it to, but I did not scroll through my playlist and trying to find a song that reminded me of this story already, because there aren't any songs like that. Or if there is, it would be the song I used the last time I wrote about Senior Week. But there are lyrics in here that feel poignant, looking at them. On a literal level, there's "The cops stand around like there's nothing to do," which speaks to what I was saying earlier, how cops are going about their jobs in an evil way, harassing kids and letting the actual dead bodies rot in McDonald's parking lots. Then there's the chorus:

"And you'll say
'That's okay
That's okay, they never liked me anyway'
But there's a killer in your heart."

Which probably speaks to the fear I have that within me there is a darkness that I can't shake. Like, this unquenchable need to be right, and when someone tells me I am wrong, that I have this dark urge to prove 'em right, sometimes by enacting revenge. The comradery between like-minded high schoolers in that town is something that I wanted to believe so badly was true, and that illusion was shattered when I was kicked out of a party for no reason, and I felt that urge to get even, to bring these fuckers down to my level, when I was made to feel low.

Maybe I still get that urge, is my point. Maybe I'd never stoop so low as to use the oppressors as a tool to realize that urge. Maybe I'm older and more in control of my emotions. Maybe I'm a bit more self-aware of the idea that this urge is not healthy and that I need to find better ways to deal with it (and I have dealt with it pretty good in the seventeen years since, all things considered). But it's still there. There's a killer in my heart. Oh well, they never liked me anyway.