There is a nameless green just before Commonwealth Avenue crosses Charlesgate in Boston. It is a long rectangle with a stone bridge imitation crossing a knoll west of its center; that center is a stone bench that faces downtown, difficult to see anything but the Charlesgate overpass and trees that all but cover the Prudential and John Hancock towers.
I first sat here a few years ago, after buying a Judge Dredd omnibus that I only just started last month. I bought it at Comicopia, there across the top right corner of the park. Further behind is Nuggets, my least favorite record store. If from the bench you crane left, you can just see BU’s Barnes and Noble, which I used to instinctively avoid because it swallowed too much of my money at the beginning of every semester. Now I sat here a second time, again after spending an absurd amount on books. Higher literature than Dredd, if that’s a comfort.
One of the books I bought, Patti Smith’s “M Train,” is antidepressant-by-memoir, an attempt by punk’s poet laureate to understand the life of her memories and the death of her husband. It is comforting to read the thoughts of someone as preoccupied as I am with connections and coincidence. I am intently searching for the meaning of the title — no mention of the New York subway yet, but on page 93: “lingering in the M section I was fortuitously drawn into the interdimensional world of Haruki Murakami. I had never read Murakami.”
This place can make me uncomfortable. Boston, not the park. Boston University is where I found my family, then lost myself. It’s where I learned that I have always been voracious — music, food, friends, drugs, sleep, TV, words spoken and read. This gets me into trouble.
I came to Boston to see two acts, Diet Cig and Kate Tempest, Saturday and Monday. They’d be my first concerts since the basement nights that filled my manic-depressive stint in Pittsburgh. Both concerts were at Brighton Music Hall, not as famous as the Paradise but much deeper into and more emblematic of Allston scum. Even among concert halls the floorplan is bizarrely spacious and unfolding (no fewer than three bars), but compared to Pittsburgh basements, the effect is an overall agoraphobia. The last time I was here I saw angry gospel punk on a date with a girl on whom I’d crushed for two years. I learned later, after a mental breakdown yanked me to Rhode Island and away from a second date, that she loved cocaine a little too much.
Diet Cig is a happy punk two piece fronted by Alex Luciano, a soprano sprite who bounces across stages in wild spins that need her guitar amped wirelessly. At Saturday’s show, during an opening act, I could see Alex through the draped windows of the upstairs dressing room. She did not bounce or sing, and she looked stressed.
I spend most of my time stressed. When I’m in Boston, I stress that there’s something broken between me and my friends, and I’m learning that it has nothing to do with my mental illness. That’d be easy. The break is a gash of distance, a rearranging of expectations. I learned these people in saturation, so often together that making memories was a waiting game. Now I see them in visits. You can plan visits, but you can’t plan memories.
Concerts aside, we had no big plans, and as I get older concerts seem like less of a big deal anyways. Bananabone and Licks, at my prodding, were up for a viewing of the 2014 accidentally-absurdist trainwreck “Winter’s Tale” on Sunday. That didn’t happen, continuing a tradition of almost watching it and then deciding, after procrastination, that the moment isn’t quite right and that it’s a little late anyways, isn’t it?
That’s the pithy version, if I were to back-of-DVD summarize. All gathered in the usual apartment, some were finishing up assignments and digital errands while BBone and I fell into our usual routine of masturbatory anti-wit, trying to make each other laugh, often at the expense of our attention to the rest of the gang. This annoys the gang. That night it especially hurt KP. It took hugs and apologies and help cooking pasta salad to (slowly, slightly) redeem ourselves for the evening.
My Kate Tempest plans were up in the air. KP might have skipped Speak for Yourself to go with me, but that night she had to lead the meeting. Speak is BU’s spoken word poetry club, only lovely people allowed, thanks. If there’s any friend I owe some loving favors, it’s KP. She’s an energetic and bright poet, and try as I might I’ve never been much for poetry. I’m bad at writing it. I struggle reading it. I get uncomfortable watching it. Though I know I owe her plenty of things, KP insisted I needn’t come to the Speak meeting.
Feeling rude for deliberating, I was trying to explain my dilemma to Bananabone when he stopped me and asked, “Isn’t Kate Tempest a poet?”
Well, sure, plenty of spoken word, yeah, but she’s written novels too, and I’m in it for the rap. But then what is rap but — ?
“Shit.”
As reverent as I am towards music and musicians, I wonder what’s been lost or gained in Speak over Kate Tempest. I know for certain that I chose intimacy over illusion. Diet Cig was fantastic (I have a new and intense respect for Noah Bowman’s drumming), but I left the show with a head full of words for what I think I’ve always felt about concerts — they’re distant. I gather in a crowd of strangers to see musicians, who, even though music and images give a tenuous illusion of intimacy, are also strangers. I’m not short but I’m not tall either, so there’s often a lot of craning and shuffling to see, over and through a rift of dancing strangers up to the stage, and even for the people in the front row, the division that is the lip of the stage. It is a comforting effort to create connection through music, to agree on this one thing with a group of people, to dance and sing about it. I don’t know. I’ve grown too wary of good feelings, and I’m jaded by how boring and flawed most musicians are. I can’t shake thinking about Alex up in that window, and how I felt closer to Diet Cig before they were made real for me. Maybe it felt different in the front row. I’ve never been in the front row, but then again, I’ve never tried to be.
In the park with my book haul, two hours to kill, I started reading “M Train” while listening to Patti Smith’s first album, but was repeatedly interrupted by the life of spring. A father chased his daughter back and forth across the red brick path down the center, and a group of students behind me held that study picnic that’s endemic of Boston’s warm days. They sat in a circle on the knoll and intermittently looked up as one of them performed various gymnastics from a slackline he’d slung over a branch. I thought about my few warm days as a student and lamented all the study picnics I must have missed, how few times I’d even visited Boston Common, yet knew that no number of sunny days could stop my reflexive regret. Trying again to read but drawn up to stare at the Prudential Center, I thought of my first visit there. Early freshman year, because I don’t remember wearing a jacket. It was night, and most of the stores were closing, and the Pru without stores isn’t much but a stark network of glass and plaster caverns, which we didn’t mind because we were new to the city and to each other, and company was enough.
Brought down the steel lines of the Pru, my eyes landed on Charlesgate and I was again struck by words for a feeling I’ve always had. Past the park and the overpass is the slow crawl to downtown, the end of the Allston extension that is BU. I have spent much more time looking at that skyline than walking under it. As Patti finished singing “Elegie,” I turned away towards dinner at Noodle Street, towards my friends.
As graduation looms for many of them, there is a sense that the time for grand memories is over, or at least that we’ve learned to stop trying so hard for joy — well, I shouldn’t presume to say “we,” but it comes easy after a few days back in the fold. Sunday morning began with pancakes and idle conversation. We laughed often and loud, but also communicated in that stilted, half-formed way that old friends can, knowing each other’s minds and saying years of memories through a few words, finishing fragmented sentences and references with glances and smiles. A cup of coffee and another, a walk to Coolidge Corner and back, more shit shooting, on like that through the weekend until I remember again what home feels like.
I saw on Facebook that my mother’s parents are selling their home and moving twelve miles east to a brick townhouse. And after months of renovation pictures, renovations on a house that has grandparented me for half my life. All just to sell it? I had no idea. My mom was told not to tell me. I’m reminded of that day in 2010, when I saw on Facebook that crisp asphalt and handsome bathrooms had replaced the cracked stoneways and moldy stalls of my summer camp memories. I spent a day or so in quiet fury at the improvements. I wanted to tell someone, my favorite counselor or maybe the girl I loved. By the time I was a counselor I had other changes to worry about.
I woke up at 11am on Monday and realized I had no money for the T and so I walked all the way from Harvard Avenue to Crispy Crepes, where we’d agreed on a late breakfast. I remember the walk from Allston to campus being much longer than thirty minutes. Christ, it takes me an hour to walk and bus to work, and I used to pay Uber to haul my drunk ass back to campus?
Crispy Crepes (Creepy Craps (Crappy Croups)) used to be across from our sophomore dorm on Buswell street, and I’d rather not think about how much money I’ve spent there. It has since moved to Comm Ave and central campus, right next to University Grill and the flower shop that blasts rap and electronica onto the sidewalk. Sweet Beef worked at the old store, and she greeted the owner as she met me and KP for crepes and coffee. We ate and looked out the window at the heart of campus as classes ended and students swarmed about holding up traffic. They looked so young, and I thought about the difference four years makes and how at 18 I had not understood the weariness and quiet wisdom of the seniors. I don’t understand it any better now, because I feel altogether too young and stupid for the world around me.
After lunch we ambled to the COM lawn and waited the clear golden thirty minutes before their next classes, flanked on one end by the new and style-cramping behemoth science building and on the other by Warren Towers and a view of the dorm’s renovated dining hall. As we lay on the grass, we considered that maybe the constant changes on BU’s campus are a blessing. It could be freeing, we decided, that a place you love and remember no longer exists as it did for you. This is selfish and possessive in a way that soothes me, but I don’t think it can take away the pain of memory.
KP and Sweet Beef went to class, and suggested the third floor of Barnes and Noble as a good place to read as I waited for dinner. I’d forgotten how intoxicating the massive bookstore is, and was immediately snared by the maze of stories, doomed upon entry. The beginning of the end for my wallet was a girl, who, seeing me measure “1Q84” in my hands, told me she loved it and was in fact looking for another Murakami to read after the 1000-page introduction. I told her I’d heard of Haruki Murakami and knew he was, like, Japan’s big postmodernist or something, and that I’d never read him.
“He’s fantastic,” she said. “I read that one for class and it changed my life. I’m trying to decide on another.”
“Doesn’t it make you anxious-“
“Yes.”
“-that we’re always trying to catch up on old classics as endless new classics are being written?”
“Yes.”
She was dressed correctly for the springtime threat of summer. A loose tank top, tight athletic shorts, sunglasses. I wore jeans, an old camp shirt, and a flannel, and was sweating. I had decided to buy only two small overpriced memoirs, but upon adding Murakami’s surrealist giant, I allowed myself it and two more, one of them “A Feast for Crows,” whose $9.99 price added an illusion of thrift. I paid for all of it and went upstairs to read, but was overcome immediately with a need to escape. As if by instinct I headed up the street, and remembered the park and stone bench right before I reached them and sat down and smoked an anxious cigarette.
Noodle Street, a kitschy Thai restaurant, is the very first place I ever ate in Boston, just me and my mom, before Freshman Orientation. The same woman who served us then, who I think is the owner, took my order as I sat surrounded by the whole Boston family, a big deal in these busy and responsible times.
KP looked at me and asked when the doors opened for Kate Tempest. “Seven,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter, I’m coming to Speak.”
“You don’t have to!”
“I want to.” She smiled at me, and we all kept smiling as we talked about very adult plans and futures, and for the first time I heard the future and was not angry or afraid or upset, just laughed with the people I love.
I felt right at home as KP introduced me to the Speak gang, because they were, every one of them, smoking cigarettes outside. As I was explaining my school/life situation as politely as I could manage, a group of three walked past, and one of the smokers asked whether they’d be at the meeting.
“Nah,” they said. “We’re actually going to see poetry.”
“Oh right on, where?”
“In Allston — Brighton Music Hall!”
Back before dinner, I felt that it was the end of something besides winter. An incomprehensible relief swept me, relief for the first time in months, and I had no words for it. I sat centered on the stone bench in the bare-treed promenade, looked away from Allston and waited for someone to berate me for spending $100 on books.
