Wednesday, June 29, 2005

The Pumpkin Cycle, Part One, the Second Third: "I used to be a little boy."

DIARY

Continued from here. This part is the autobiographical bit. So if you don't want to listen to me talk about growing up, skip this, because there's nothing more to see here.

I'm going to mainly talk about Smashing Pumpkins in 10th and 11th grade, but I have to go back a little further. The recap, then, is this.

When I was twelve, my family topped off five years of home schooling by moving to Flushing and enrolling me in 6th grade at Elms Elementary School. I had no clue how kids interacted in a classroom or at recess, except from my half-dozen friends from Flint around the neighborhood and at church. After a couple months of concert band and an abortive second attempt at Boy Scouts, I settled in as a sort of militant geek who picked a lot of fights, recruited my cousins in making lists of all the girls I wanted to hook up with (the results, a net zero that year), a voracious reader and role-player, and sub-par "gifted" student. My bizarre opinions and actions never really allowed me to become popular, but my success in athletics (track and football) and friendliness to anyone who wasn't hostile did make me many friends. This pattern basically continued and expanded through the end of 7th grade, my first year in junior high.

I started to mellow out at the end of that year, but that just set the stage for more action the following year when I became obsessed with drama club, learned how to lie, (not necessarily correlated) and found any school work, particularly math, useless. This was a problem, because growing up in my family two things are taken with deadly seriousness... the first was the notion of mutual respect (the problem with lying)... the second was the expectation of acadmic effort and results (the problem with blowing off math). There were several miserable weeks, and several iffy months. In the end, 8th grade was a basic, if exhausting, success... I won best Supporting Actor of the drama club, a couple academic awards, was accepted into the Michigan Renaissance Festival academy and, most importantly, nominally passed math. It goes down, however, as one of the most miserable feeling years of my life, despite many moments of personal highs.

The summer of 1993 was low key compared to 92, and coming into the next school year, my Freshman year at Flushing HS, a lot of my energy was put into avoiding a repeat of 8th grade. After one more fight at a football game (the kid had insulted my sister) I resolved to stop fighting for good, I was more consistent in my classes, and began to phase out my interest in roleplaying and Clarinet in favor of a more career-oriented approach to theater, at this stage, acting. My friends and interests shifted around this decision. One new circle was cultivated at the Michigan Renaissance Festival Academy. These were high school students and actors, most at least a couple years older than me, and a few into their late teens, and most were from Detroit suburbs. Another circle formed later in the year when I was accepted in a play at Flint Youth Theatre, which at the time was populated mainly by kids from the Flint Public Schools and Powers Catholic. I inevitably began to meet up again with friends I'd lost or misplaced when my family moved to Flushing, and these friendships, both old and new, took on an intensity that my Flushing friendships had never attained.

Anyone who's met me since has probably discovered the Flint obsession before just about anything else. Early '94 was the beginning of the Flint obsession. Increasingly through the rest of high school, Flushing was just a place I spent mornings and nights. Almost all of my close friends attended Flint Central and Northern, Powers, or lived south of Flint, nearer Detroit.

My new friends affected me in other ways. For starters, my old friends in Flushing were the less socially adept tier of junior high drama club remnants. They didn't give a shit about my musical tastes, but pumped a lot of energy into getting me to convert to Christianity. I held out, though faintly.

My new friends, on the other hand, never pressed me to give up my music, but they also let me know that they were not impressed. And in retrospect, I must've seemed to have pretty idiosyncratic tastes, consisting of showtunes, romantic classical music, Sting and Genesis, and other hits culled from Cars 108, a local soft rock station. On the other hand, the break from proselytizing was a relief.

Two of tour big factors, then, are accounted for. The third is drugs/sex. They absolutely terrified me, irrationally so. In 9th grade I couldn't imagine keeping a friendship with someone who had dabbled in these things, and even four years later I found them deeply troubling.

Finally, I wanted a girlfriend. I ached for a girlfriend. Between Genesis and Disney's Fantasia, I'd cultivated a vision of romantic love that was so far above any worldly attainment that it essentially represented heaven on earth. I also had a strong belief in love as divinely inspired, in love at first sight, and in absolute loyalty to the object of chemistry. This led to a handful of immature, long-term crushes, that were merely annoying to the girls themselves, and would've been merely creepy if I'd been more assertive. Let's see... in 6th grade it was Natalie, in 7th and 8th grade, Alexis (who lived far away, in Texas), and 9th grade, Tracy. I'm only hitting the high points, incidentally. I really wanted a girl who loved me and who I could be in love with. This occupied my mind virtually all of the time.

The summer of '94 was, from a distance, momentous, but up close seemed as low key as the summer before. I'd returned to the Renaissance Festival and had landed a "leading" part in our production of Alladin. I was also taking drivers ed. In the meantime, my Papa (Grandpa Coyne) died, an event which affected me more than I thought because I started having nightmares about it. It's the only time in my life I've dreamt like that. This was the setup, then, for the beginning of 10th grade. I was anxious that I wasn't getting what or where I wanted, had a strong sense of self, but was still increasingly willing to scrutinize and make changes to reach my objectives.

* * * * *



I'd realized over the summer that there was a deep disconnect between myself and my intense friendships, as well as these scores of girls for whom I believed I was destined (one at a time, obviously). It all boiled down to music. My logic was quite simple: "I think these people are wonderful, and they think this music is wonderful. If I trust my judgment (and I do) and I trust their judgment (and I do), then there's no reason not to give their music a try." I decided to try it. I expected to like it. I remember clear as ice that morning we stood in the coffee cottage at the Ren Fest, myself and two Chrises, two Ryans probably, Melissa, Trevor, and others, and I asked them questions about music, which they answered. I also had started watching My So-Called Life and carefully noted Angela's answers to her favorite music: Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, Porno for Pyros (which was right out due to sex/drugs as explained above). Because for these friends, this music was more than music. It was sound that rolled around in their brains and through their skulls and they hummed it to themselves. They formed bands in giddy emulation and played concerts in their parents' backyards. This had to be worth more than some dull Phil Collins' tunery.

I'd already had expereinced a shock prelude to this on the night when Ryan persuaded my parents to let me go to Laserpalooza, an event at Flint's Planetarium that filled to twice capacity, blew out our collective eardrums and, to my considerable awe and astonishment, prompted a drug-bedazzled girl at my feet to crawl halfway up my leg during one of the more psychadelic sequences. I heard the song Oceans that night on the way to the show, and there was something of Genesis' wistful sweetness in the low whistles throughout, but Eddie Vedder wasn't asking. He was demanding. How could Sting even exist, even draw breath in a world where men and women of such passions gave voice to their deep churnings? I had deep churnings. I was a writer and actor. I found in this music the deep churnings I drove to make wakes in my own work. I found the fear and desire and sweat and head thrashing that marked my most frustrating nights.

Going back to that morning at the Ren Fest, I hatched a plan, the only slight deception (it was a deception of omission) that was unambiguously worthwhile. I had a CD player. I'd periodically receive offers from BMG and Columbia House in the mail... get 11 CDs for 1 cent, or get 5 CDs for the price of 1. I opted for one of the latter (the former seemed to good to be true and I was suspicious). I consulted with the kids in Ms. Sharrow's English 10 class. I made my selection. And then I, I'm pretty sure without getting any permission, sent in the slip for my five CDs.

I selected these:

- The Crow soundtrack
- Melissa Etheridge, Here I Am
- Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral
- Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream
- Stone Temple Pilots, Core

I could scarcely believe when the music actually arrived (believe it or not, it took me six months to pay BMG off... I hadn't a job). In many ways, I'd kept expecting something to go wrong. That night I slipped up to my room and turned my CD soft with the door shut so that only I could hear. I listed to the most promising songs off each CD, and began to form opinions.

Melissa Etheridge, a shoe-in I figured, was surprisingly boring. Stone Temple Pilots and the Crow were too big of a musical leap at this point; they were too hard. It seems a little strange now to not say the same for NIN, but since I was feeling adventurous, if not rebellious, I was immediately drawn to this stark and rusting case with the explicit lyrics warning. The song Eraser and the The Downward Spiral somewhat upset me, but I listened to March of the Pigs and A Warm Place over and over and over.

My first impression of the Pumpkins, also, was underwhelming. I'd simply selected the most engaging song title on the CD, "Geek U.S.A." and found as I did with most of these songs, that it was a bit too hard for me. Each step was still a small step. I worked best with harmonics, with feedback and echo effects, reverb and elegiac lyrics on the nature of love. Which explains why I ended up obsessed with the Pumpkins, but also why I turned off Geek before I ever heard "in a dream..."

Soon I was skipping track to track on my new CDs, deciding from the first burst of each song whether I liked it or not. On the Pumpkins CD, I identified Today, Rocket, and Spaceboy this way [I even wrote my own "song" to the tune of Today ("Me and my Geo Metro") which my "band" "Simple" (consisting of myself, Ryan, and Mitch) were to play alongside such hits as Nuked Cheese Sandwiches and Eating Eyeballs. That band got nowhere, surprise surprise, though I did "record" one song "To Take Two Tutus Too Far," which is lying around this apartment on a cassette somewhere]. I soon got in the habit of going to sleep to this music on softly, and when I realized I was only benefiting from half of the albums I'd spent so much money on, I began listening to the full CDs on repeat.

And here's another specific event: one night I was somewhat tired. My family had ordered a pizza. I ate several slices. We were watching a movie together. It might have been a Friday night. I went upstairs to go to bed. I put on Siamese Dream, lay down, and looked out the window. Cherub Rock, Quiet, and Today played through the background. These were songs, by now, with which I was familiar. In my bedroom in Flushing, if you lay in bed at night with the lights out, and the lights are on in the living room below, the light spills far out across the gravel two-tread driveway and deep into the furrows on the facing Cottonwoods. Out further, in one neighbors garden, far away and across the street, the floodlight takes on a bluish-green hue as it spills down his tilled garden. I was growing very sleepy. Behind me, a noisy song I hadn't followed abruptly plunged into a soft strumming melody with distinct evocations: autumn, wind chimes, wind moving across muddy fresh water with leaves... this music was far more gentle than Today... far more gentle than Spaceboy even. Lovely like lilacs, and sad. And the singer, with a whispered razor voice, almost androgynous, almost feminine, sang some words I could not follow. I was quickly falling asleep. But then, I also knew I was hearing something important. So I struggled to stay awake, to hear the crucial, identifying moment. On the edge, I reached out and grabbed it. He sang: "Do you feel love is real?" I do! I thought, and then I fell asleep.

From that moment on, and probably for the rest of my life, that band is my favorite band.

END OF POST

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