James and I met Warren in September 1983, early in our sophomore year. He was tall and husky with a thick crop of wavy red hair, mildly clumsy, prone to swearing like a sailor when the occasion merited, a voracious reader and partial autodidact, an introvert who nonetheless knew how to play the folks at dinner in the cafeteria with his vast recall of minutiae and twisted sense of humor. Given Warren's interests in computer science and the campus radio station and lack of interest in frat life, it was truly only a matter of time before the two of us (although James more than I) began hanging with him.
By the spring semester, Warren's roommate had moved out and the three of us gathered frequently in his room to check out albums in his collection. James and I learned about early King Crimson, Adrian Belew, Klaatu, Blotto, and—most importantly—Yes. At the time our respective LP stashes lagged behind that of Warren, though we would soon begin catching up.
In early April '84 the three of us met Kristine, a high school senior from Nashville who was on campus to interview for a scholarship. Warren and I in particular connected with her, and the weeks following were full of letter exchanges and occasional phone calls. Kristine and Warren began a brief long-distance romance while I buried whatever feelings I might have had and more-or-less contented myself with the role of good friend. I've stayed in touch with Kristine through the years—these days we're connected on Facebook and do battle over Words with Friends. The last time I saw her in person was just around twenty years ago when my family and I were in the Orlando area, where Kristine lived at the time. We met for breakfast at a Cracker Barrel, and I think it was then that she gave me copies of two cassettes that we had recorded and mailed to her that spring.
The first was recorded on April 6, the Friday after we'd met. Warren and I are in his room, alternately playing songs one or both of us like and blathering on about whatever comes to mind. The second is much more interesting to me. We don't announce the date of recording this time, though there are big clues—it's 11:00pm on a Friday night, and Warren mentions at one point that he's "glad all that horsey stuff is over," meaning it's after the Kentucky Derby. That pretty much limits it to May 11, forty years ago today—the 18th would have been too close to the end of the school year. James is present this time, and we've set up shop in our room, 404 Clay Hall. (The photo at the top of the post is the only one I have of James and Warren together, such as that is. I'm 99% certain it was taken in our dorm room sometime in the spring of '84.) Let's press play, as I've done a few times in recent weeks.
Side one:
Led Zeppelin, "Good Times, Bad Times"
Dire Straits, "Tunnel of Love"
Blue Öyster Cult, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper"
Blue Öyster Cult, "The Marshall Plan"
Warren picked the first set of tunes. His musical tastes generally skew heavier than mine, though we're simpatico with respect to Making Movies, particularly side one.
Items of note:
--Transy has a 4-4-1 calendar, which means we're in the throes of May Term, when students take only one course. This leaves plenty of time for scheduling campus-wide events such as that afternoon's Mock Olympics. The three people in the room represented the Independents well—James and Warren comprised part of the winning tug-of-war team, and I had charged from the back of the pack to take first place in the one-lap race around the "back circle," an oval driveway surrounding the large green space between dorms. Victory came at a heavy price, though, as "then I got sick."
--In referencing the heft that he and James brought to the tug-of-war team, Warren offers up that Jeeps in WWII weighed only 500 lbs, around their combined weight.
--I'd included a map of James's and my room in one of my letters to Kristine, even going to far as to label four piles (two for each of us) as "junk." During the recording session, James is apparently reclining in the spot formerly occupied by "More Will's Junk," wrapped in his mother's Afghan, cold because he's wearing shorts. ("I'm a Student Activities Board person—we don't wear real clothes.")
--As James lays there mummified, Warren avails himself of the opportunity to quote liberally from "Eggboiler," a National Lampoon parody of Stephen King: "No, (James) was simply a man. A man with mental problems. And oh yes, he was a werewolf. But not on that particular night. On that night he was just a man with a club…who had been bitten by an alien." It's clearly not the first time those lines have been uttered in my presence, as I join in for the last five words.
--Warren cracks a tasteless Karen Carpenter joke or two, compares Billy Idol's appearance to a chainsaw, and disses the poetry of Rod McKuen.
--The three of us have spent oodles of time this winter and spring in the newly opened Student Center, watching hours and hours of MTV, alternately finding gems and objects for derision. One of the former that receives mention this evening is Neil Young's "Wonderin'," and we do a couple rounds of "Doo wahhhh…walk, walk."
--During May Term, Warren is taking astronomy as a GPA boost, while James and I have it far less easy with Compiler Construction, a vital course for the CS major. James says he's "struggling and surviving;" I don't comment but it was one of the more time-intensive classes I took in college.
Billy Joel, "The Stranger"
Side two:
U2, "New Year's Day"
Fleetwood Mac, "Gypsy"
Marshall Crenshaw, "There She Goes Again"
My choices. It's fascinating to me that two of these songs (U2 and Crenshaw) were featured in posts I wrote last year about goings-on from earlier in 1984. I'd had the Joel album since 9th grade and am guessing I'd just recently picked up a used copy of Mirage.
Items of note:
--After the first side wrapped, we took a midnight cherry Coke break at Jerry's, a Kentucky-based hamburger chain not all that different from Big Boy. (FYI, Long John Silver's sprung out of the company that owned Jerry's. Ultimately most Jerry's were sold off to a Denny's franchisee, though one restaurant with that name remains, about 15 miles from where I live.) Whereupon we had an experience that remains legendary (at least for us) forty years on.
We were semi-Friday night regulars at Jerry's by this point and had acquired a knack for amusing the late-shift waitresses. This night, Warren was playing with the ketchup bottle on our table—for some reason, our conversation led him at least once to pretend to drink from it. This induced comments from nearby patrons who'd recently arrived: "Would someone tell that boy to grow up?" It might not surprise you to learn that said patrons showed signs of inebriation (I estimated their BAC to be 0.5). Warren attempted to be polite to the woman who said this, but she responded in a mock surprised voice, "He called me 'ma'am!'"
After choosing to clear out before things deteriorated further, in the parking lot we discovered that we weren't quite out of danger. As James began pulling out in his black Caprice Classic (we affectionately called it the land yacht), an even bigger white vehicle tears into the lot, headed directly toward James's door. I'm in the back seat so I may not have understood why James and Warren were suddenly bracing for impact, but the other car quickly swerved into a parking spot, missing the Caprice completely. Down rolled the window, and the driver, a large woman carrying a large drink (from the description on the tape I can't tell if James and Warren are talking about a Big Gulp or a can of Foster's), admonished us angrily: "I waddn't gonna hit you!" It will never be known if she was about to join the drunken folks inside—we sped back to Transy before anything else bad could almost befall us.
--Warren mangles the "by jingo by gee by gosh by gum" line out of e.e. cummings' "next to of course god america i" (which I recognize, having written a brief analysis of it back in high school). "I could go down to my room to look it up, but I. Don't Want. To."
--I get picked on a couple of times for lame rebuttals to aspersions cast in my general direction, James imitating the physics professor we'd taken earlier in the year. Dr. Moulder (who I really liked) had a style of talking that involved many slight pauses with almost a click of the tongue or a short breath in between some words. "That was, (pause/click) Will, (pause/click) you know, (pause/click) that was pretty silly what you just said there."
--It's approaching 2am when we finally get around to the fare-thee-wells. By this point we know that Kristine won't be attending Transy in the fall, instead going to a regional state school in Tennessee. There's no mention of the visit that Warren and I will be making to Nashville in two weeks.
--We wrap up with a couple of tunes from the album of the year to that point.
Yes, "It Can Happen"
Yes, "Hearts"
--
I've been known to refer to students in my classes as "kids"—sometimes ironically, sometimes not (not in their presence, of course). I don't think it was necessarily expected that all three of the fellows (one 18, one 19, and one 20) who huddled with a tape recorder on the evening of May 11, 1984, would be around 18–20-year-olds for much-to-all of their working lives. We would no doubt have bristled at the notion of being called a kid then, but it is true that at that moment none of us had any idea about much of anything that lay ahead.
--
Last month I wrote to Kristine to acknowledge forty years of being aware of each other's existence and the friendship that followed. I also thanked her for the gift of the tapes—it came to me as I listened to them that the one from 5/11 was a special treasure, the only item in my possession with James's voice on it. Here are some of the words of his I'm left with:
--"We did make the waitresses laugh."
--"I had to keep taking ketchup bottles away from you all night long."
--The continuation of this cassette tape is all on my shoulders. If I screw up now, it's all over. (Pause.) Oh well."
--"Well, Will, (pause/click) you know (pause/click) you just said something else really silly. (pause/click) I'm just going to have to give you a B for that—you didn't really explain. I just don't understand."
--And the final words on the tape: "Have good fun. Have a good life. I don't know, man…I was never good at… Anyway. Adieu. Enjoy Tennessee and all the wonderful things therein. Take it easy. Goodbye. Until next time."
--
Forty years, passed in the blink of an eye. Four people, certainly no longer kids. One of them, gone far too soon.
Many thanks to Warren for jostling my memory on some of the events described, and again, profuse thanks to Kristine for her foresight in knowing I'd be so glad to have those cassettes.
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