Thank You, And Goodnight

Last night I went to a show at a place that shares a wall with Alfred's Tomato Pies, and so the outside area where smokers and smokers' girlfriends hang out between bands is characterized by the divine aroma of Trenton pizza. Inside, though, it smells like a dentist's office, which is fitting since it used to be one. As you walk in, you are greeted by a large framed cartoon, drawn in what appears to be crayon, of a giant tooth with human facial features sitting in a dentist's chair, letting off a speech bubble that says, "The bill is HOW much?!?!?!" Outside, Matt smoked Marlboros and I popped Tic-Tacs, and suddenly everybody was corralled inside with a general, "They're going on!" I waited until Matt finished his cigarette and then we went inside too.

The place was dark except for sound-activated stage lights of so many competing colors that they all just bled into a dull, muddy purple. I stood at a place on this ramp where I couldn't exactly see the band that was playing, but I could see everyone staring raptly into the purple glow. I changed positions a few times but still couldn't see anything, as though a shifty man in a trenchcoat were holding all the flickering secrets of the universe balled up in his hands and constantly turning his back on me so I wouldn't get to see what was inside. Before I found a good spot, though, I decided that I liked them. I couldn't hear words and I couldn't even hear notes; there was just the duration of yells -- long, long, short, long -- like some sort of familiar morse code in which every member of the audience was fluent. They sounded like New Jersey, in the most nostalgiac, outline-of-New-Jersey-stenciled-on-a-piece-of-fraying-fabric kind of way, and I took immediate comfort in the fact that New Jersey sounds exactly the same even when I am not listening. When I finally made my way up closer to the stage, I saw that New Jersey looks the same too: skinny girlfriends with tattoos and too much eyeliner leaning languidly against their man, who is probably wearing a black hoodie and navy athletic shorts, a uniform that flies in the face of conventional ideas about matching, and one that pays some sort of sartorial tribute to when everything got really weird and angry and people started stabbing each other.

While Matt was setting up, a guy in a torn denim vest who I judged to be about sixteen tried to strike up a conversation with me. "Did you go to the Warped Tour, or whatever?" he asked. I told him I had not. "Well, would you have wanted to go, if you could have?" he asked, and I somehow understood his question completely. "I guess not," I said, though I had no idea who was playing this year. I resisted a sudden and embarrassing urge to explain my laconic answers by saying to him, "I don't live here; I live in DC," but I wasn't sure that that was entirely true. During his set, a kid wearing a sombrero came and sat down on the stage next to Matt. When the song was over, he politely asked, "What do you write your songs about?" Matt said, "Existential dread." Someone in the audience groaned, and rightfully so.

Later, outside, we talked with a guy who said he really liked the set. Then, completely unprovoked, he launched into a vivid description of a fight he was in at a show recently. The show took place at a roller skating rink where I had some of my best birthday parties in grade school. He lifted up his sleeve and showed us where some guy had stabbed him with a box cutter there. And he acted disgusted with it all, but then, with a creepy flicker of pride in his face, he told us a few keywords to search for on Youtube if we wanted to see a good video of the fight. I told him I probably did not want to see that. I liked it better before people started throwing chairs at each other and wielding baseball bats wholeheartedly; I liked it better when it was just a room full of starving eyes squinting at an almost invisible glow.