I wanted to take her somewhere else. The first couple of
times it was my old downtown neighborhood, The Commodore, Maya’s, walking down
Yamhill or Morrison to the waterfront, walking up Everett with me complaining:
“This Pearl District bullshit didn’t exist when I lived here” or some similarly
stupid observation about the passing of time. So we went to the eastside, to
Hawthorne. We went up the street and down, nothing that exciting. We went into
a pub that was trying to be both fancy and hip and ordered beers. We drank a
few beers, got tipsy. Phoenix came on the sound system. This was a while before
their music started playing on the radio. I pointed the song out to her and she
said she liked it. We bored of the place, and I suggested we walk next door to
the record store, pick up a copy of the Phoenix CD, and drive to this place up
on the west hills that I hadn’t shown her. We got in her car, put the CD in and
played it loud. I screamed directions over the music and we somehow found
Council Crest Park, high above the Portland skyline. By the time we got there
we had almost sobered up. But it was late in the day and the soft angled light
and view of the city kept us light-headed. Full of love, we stayed for a while and
wanted to linger longer but we both had things to do the next day, so we took
turns hiding in an enormous cedar to piss, then got back in the car for the long
drive back. We played the first few songs of the CD over and over on the way
back, laughing at the seeming senselessness of the lyrics but enjoying the
music immensely just the same. As is my wont on the freeway, I kept getting
distracted by the skid mark of tires as they veered off the road and stopped
before cracked concrete or bent metal. Those tire marks were a kind of writing,
telling stories of ruin. At the time, I failed to interpret properly the
narratives before me.
When she broke up with me, Phoenix was on heavy rotation on
the radio. Hearing the first few bars of “Lisztomania” or “1901” made me
miserable and I couldn’t change the station fast enough. One time I left one of
those songs on long enough that my eyes welled with tears before I changed it.
After a long while hearing Phoenix on the radio only made me a little sad. I
could feel my heart contract but the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make me
change the station. Eventually, I felt okay when they came on the radio. Not
good, not sad, just okay. These days, Phoenix reminds me of that trip and that
it was fun, even if what followed it wasn’t.
