Chroma, Joe

I saw him walk into the room, gray college tee and clashing red-and-brown plaid shorts, hair disheveled and slightly sweat-stained from the summer heat, both hands gripping the faded white cardboard box of magical elixir that we had all been waiting for. He was the only one with the means to this particular end, something about a fake ID from a trailer downtown, I never got the full story. He walked in like Christ with the bread, and we all jumped up to grabbed a loaf. It tasted bready, is the thing; it was a figure of speech, about bread, but ironically kinda true.

The music was playing and you can guess what. You could probably guess if you saw the look in his eyes, as he sat down on the dog-haired couch and took his first sips of the only-cool-not-cold elixir. A slight roll of the eyes, but reserved, like he knew he didn't like it but didn't know why. A glimmer, too, perhaps a vision of the future briefly passing by. In nineteen years, having long ago eschewed the ugly plaid board shorts, he would sit down and hear this music again, and know that he was wrong. Now, in this moment, he knew that he didn't know, and that's the important part.

Important to me, the observer. I like being here, among these friends, because they don't bother me. That might sound like a pat way of putting it, but it's true—I have a tough time with people. I struggle to connect. These kids mostly just let me be. That's how I like it. I get to sit here, drink whatever beer is available, and observe. People-watching in micro, basically. I see myself as part of a lineage of storytellers, stretching back to the minstrels with their lutes. Unlike Cartel, I'm not really trying to impress anybody.

Maybe that's what he can't see, not yet anyway (those nineteen years will go by in the blink of an eye). That this music is the thing that is meant to impress, and that no one finds it very impressive to go out of your way to not be impressed by it. It's not impressive to hear heart-on-sleeve emo music and question it. All that does is betray an inability to place one's own heart on one's own sleeve. It's cowardice, is what it is. A complete lack of gumption, contained in a half-eyeroll. I can see it across the room. I can practically hear the creak of the eye tendons twirl, even over the pock of ping pong ball careening off red solo cup.

Twenty-seven years from now, I'll get hired to write a short article in Harper's BAZAAR, some brief sarcastic piece about men's fashion of yesteryear, and I'll really struggle with getting my thoughts down on paper, because I won't be able to stop thinking about this one particular night, the one with the broken mirror and the burnt Ellio's, and those stupid red-and-brown plaid shorts. Men's fashion indeed. I will wonder then whether the image remains so indelible because of who wore the shorts, or why, or what he listened to when he wore them, against his will, and how the shorts were a statement or a lack thereof, and what that would mean either way, and whether he even knew that you could never wear those shorts without betraying the fact that emo music was not your thing, so uncool was the clothing, so cool was the music.

In the present, the here and now, I only hear "Honestly" on the tinny iPod speakers, only taste the bready pilsner and feel a dog hair in the back of my throat. I watch as Christine and Marnie attempt to shoot ping pong balls from behind their backs, the balls missing their targets by several meters, the girls giggling uncontrollably at the attempt. Their boyfriends on the other side of the table are grimacing, each of them taking this game way too seriously, but I can see that their heads are nodding along to the music. Dan gives a shimmy, hitting the part in "Burn This City" that feels like a breakdown but isn't actually. Fifteen years from now, Dan and his wife (not Marnie, though that probably doesn't need to be clarified) will get a babysitter so that they can see Cartel perform "Burn This City" in a medium-sized room, and their voices will join the gang chorus chanting, and then they'll go back to the hotel room they booked in the nearby city and talk about having another kid, and wondering smirkingly what fresh horrors will await with the return of endless diapers.

The light down here in the basement is red. Or has a red plastic sheet covering it, giving everything a mildly bloody glow. Breona—it's her house, or her dad's, who's clearly not present—she's already hitting her third bottle. Three hours from now, she'll fall asleep in the shower. Three years from now, she'll fall to her knees when she snatches an art degree from the jaws of academic defeat. Three decades from now, almost exactly, she'll find herself reaching into her pocket for her last cigarette, which she lights in a different basement, much farther away from here, the lights non-red and fluorescent and flickering, takes a puff and says her name and what she is and then tells her story, the parts she can remember anyway. She doesn't mention this night, but it's part of her story just like it's a part of mine.

The chorus that goes "out of rhythm with our time" plays on repeat, up here. Time is a goon, cornering you and landing many punches.

Wayne stands up. I still see him from across the room. The emo music has compelled him to move. His plaid shorts swish as he jerks first one way and then the other, zigzags across the room, ostensibly for another beer, but stops short, ears perking up, maybe again hearing something that he doesn't know anything about now but can feel that he will, eventually. And he will, long after this. He'll hear the music and it will mean something to him and he'll think about all these nights now that the music meant nothing, and he'll wonder if it was all part of the adventure of life, or if it was just time wasted.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5