He caught me singing along to some garbage song. It was the year 2000 so you can take your pick of soulless hits—probably a boy band, or a teenage girl in a crop top, or a muscular man with restricted nasal airflow. I was waiting for a drink at a bar, spaced out; I didn’t realize I’d been singing until his smile floated into the periphery of my vision and I felt impaled by humiliation.
“Terrible song,” I said, forcing a casual tone. “But it’s an earworm.”
We knew each other in that vague way you can know people in college, without ever having been introduced or had a conversation. Joey, they called him, though I decided in that moment the diminutive did not suit him; he was too tall, for one. He put an elbow on the bar and said, “Is an earworm ever terrible, though, if it’s truly an earworm?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s doing what it set out to do,” he said. “It’s effective. It’s catchy.”
“Dick Cheney is effective,” I said. “Nazis were catchy.”
The grin spread again.
The bartender slid me a beer and I took it gratefully, holding the cold pint glass against my cheekbone. The song ended and a clash of bar sounds filled its void: ice shaking in tin, shuffleboard pucks clacking, a couple seated at the bar hollering in dismay at a TV suspended above the bartender’s head. Joe ordered a drink and began pulling crumpled bills from his jeans pocket. I was about to walk back to my booth when “Sara Smile” by Hall and Oates began to play, and he let out a moan.
“What a perfect song.” His hand shot into the tall dark pile of curls atop his head, then clawed its way down his cheek as he listened.
Hall and Oates! I loved Hall and Oates! They were a rare jukebox selection for the time—a band whose ‘80s sound was seen as cheesy by most people I knew, too recent to be recycled, though that wouldn’t last much longer. I leaned against the bar next to him and listened to the gorgeous, sultry first verse.
“Actually,” I said, unable to stop myself, “I would call this a perfect track, a perfect recording. Not a perfect song.” I could tell he already halfway understood but I explained anyway, with a level of detail befitting an idea of far greater complexity: “A perfect song has stronger bones. Lyrics, chords, melody. It can be played differently, produced differently, and it will almost always be great. Take ‘Both Sides, Now,’ if you’ll excuse me being that girl in a bar talking about Joni Mitchell—any singer who doesn’t completely suck can cover that song and you’ll be drowning in goosebumps, right?”
It was a leap of faith that he’d even know the song, but he gave a swift nod. “Totally.”
I ducked to avoid being swallowed by the armpit of a tall guy receiving a drink from the bartender. Joe’s eyes stayed on me, focused like spotlights, so I kept going. “Now, ‘Sara Smile’—can you imagine anyone besides Daryl Hall singing this, exactly as he sang it on this particular day?”
Joe cocked his ear. Daryl Hall responded with a long, elegant riff.
I jabbed my finger in the air, tracing the melody. “See? The most beautiful part of the verse is just him riffing. A great song—and I’m talking about the pop-rock world here, obviously—can be improved by riffing, or ruined by riffing. But it cannot rely on riffing.”
Joe didn’t look smug or bored, which were the reactions these kinds of tangents had historically won me. He didn’t give me a lecture about relativism while air-quoting the phrase “good music.” He just lifted his bottle of Budweiser, paused it at his lips, and took a drink.
The tall guy beside us smacked his shoulder and Joe’s eyes lit up with recognition, so it seemed we were done. But before I could leave, he turned back. “What’s your name again?” He squinted at me rather severely, like I was a splinter he was trying to tweeze.
“Percy,” I said. “Bye.”
I walked back to the booth where my roommate and her boyfriend were planning a party I didn’t want to have. “Finally,” Megan said as I scooted in across from them on the honey wood bench. “Do you think one of those jugs of SKYY is enough? Plus mixers and a keg?” She showed me a Post-it inserted into her day planner. “That would be fifty each. Unless the mixer is Red Bull.”
Megan was an art history major but seemed happiest when doing simple math. I tolerated her orderliness by indulging in small acts of rebellion: unscrewed toothpaste lids, late phone bill payments—all calibrated to satisfy an inner urge for chaos without disrupting our friendship, which was important to me if only for its rarity, like an ugly diamond.
“I told Trent what we discussed about not inviting the whole world,” she said as she took a sip of her cosmopolitan, casting a significant look at the boyfriend. Poor Trent. I had expected them to be broken up by now.
“Is Joey Morrow coming?” Trent said to me, with one eye on Megan. When I shrugged, he pushed: “You were talking to him at the bar, right? He’s in my econ.”
Megan twisted to peer out of the booth. “Oh, him—Joey and Zoe who both like Bowie. Yeah, they’re cool.”
I knew this, that he had a girlfriend. I watched him across the bar and thought of a rom-com I’d seen at an unfortunately impressionable age in which a man says, gazing longingly at the female lead, “A girl like that is born with a boyfriend.” With Joe it wasn’t the flawless jawline, the arching eyebrows over wide-set eyes—those were offset, in the equation of attractiveness I had learned from these same movies, by the hooked nose and gapped teeth, the too-square shoulders atop a gangly-tall body. But the way he held those angular limbs, as if this jerking energy was the obvious way to make them work. The way he smiled so easily, and frowned so easily, tortured by a blue-eyed soul song. A boy like that is born with a girlfriend.
“Amoeba warning,” Megan muttered, her eyes darting over my shoulder.
I felt a rush of fight-or-flight but didn’t turn around. I knew she was referring to staff members of Amoeba Music, the legendary Berkeley record store where I’d worked sophomore year before switching to its inferior cousin, Rasputin Music, just up the street. Amoeba had been a hellscape of pretentious snobs and one thoroughly horrifying sexual encounter; Rasputin had been fine but boring, and nobody ever talked about the actual songs there either. Now I waitressed at a diner for twice the money and felt lucky to be free of the lot of them.
“Just the undergrads,” Megan updated. “The guy with the muttonchops and two others. No Neil.”
Of course. Neil would never come to a bar like this, blocks from campus, famous for accepting even the worst fake IDs. My adrenaline eased.
“Should you invite them to the party?” she asked, nostrils flaring. “You have two seconds to decide.”
This stumped me—I hated them, but I could talk to them. “Okay!” I yelped, just in time for the Amoebans to pass by our booth without so much as a nod, let alone a conversation. Trent whistled a low tone that could be interpreted as either pity or mockery.
I recognized all three from behind. We hadn’t been close as coworkers; they had been too focused on proving themselves to the elder statesmen of the staff, the ones with hard drug experience and complicated living situations in Oakland. There was also an incident in which the muttonchops guy had made fun of me for not knowing the Brian Jonestown Massacre and I’d responded by accusing him of being “all breadth, no depth,” a view I still held: music was a collector’s habit to those guys, a sprawl of knowledge more than a well of joy. But still. A hello would’ve been called for.
Megan caught my eye, communicating sympathy with her face. I sent back gratitude. “Let’s just get Red Bull for ourselves,” I said, and she beamed.
Trent began dropping hints that the two of them should go back to his apartment, even though it was only ten and our names were on the list to play shuffleboard. At least I’d gotten out for a bit, I figured. At least I wouldn’t have to keep discussing the relative merits of vodka mixers. He slid me his half-finished pint before following Megan out of the booth. It was the kind of beer that tasted like rubber bands but I drank it anyway, urgently, aware of the clock ticking on how long a girl could be alone in a bar before she became monstrously conspicuous. I feigned interest in a stained-glass lampshade hanging low over the booth.
“Name a song that’s both.”
