Metro Jacksonville

SLACKER WEDDING

substitute almost any actual college town in the universe.



A memoir about collegetowns and the slacker lifestyle

By Jason Pettus


PROLOGUE



So I’m sitting in Chicago, minding my own business one day, when I get a call from David.

            “Hey, guess what, Debbie’s getting married to a guy in Ditch Witch.  The wedding’s in Columbia this weekend.  Let’s blow Saturday morning.”

            So David’s an old college friend of mine who has just moved to Chicago himself.  “Debbie” refers to Debbie Rust, another college friend of the two of us, from way back when we were all freshman in the mid-80’s.  “Ditch Witch,” is, of course, one of the midwest’s older and more established guitar indie bands, one whose members and fans are now approaching their thirties, a little older and wiser and with a much more mainstream and affluent audience than when we were all hanging out, playing songs for each other in our basements.

            “Columbia” is shorthand for Columbia, Missouri, the 125,000 town/city right smack dab in the middle of the Show-Me-State, the city which holds the proud alma mater of David and I and Debbie AND the Ditch Witch guys â€" the University of Missouri.  For those who don’t know, Columbia MO is one of those collegetowns that are a part of that list that might, for wont of a better word, be called “Slacker Towns:”



Austin TX

Chapel Hill NC

Madison WS

Evanston IL

Lawrence KS

Tempe AZ

etc.



            There are reasons, specific reasons, why these towns are the way they are.  But that’s another story for another time.

            There are still a lot of people we know who live in Columbia MO.  It’s because it’s a SlackerTown, and if you understand SlackerTowns then you realize what I’m speaking of.  If not â€" don’t worry, it also will be explained later.  There are still a lot of people we know there.  Some are friends.  Some are not-so-friends.  Some used to be friends, but then they moved away too, then failed, then went back to Columbia MO, SlackerTown, and were mad at us now for succeeding where they failed.  Well.  Maybe.

            David and I both, at overlapping times, spent eight years apiece in Columbia MO, some as students, some as slackers ourselves.  I have only been back to Columbia twice in four years.  The last time was about two years ago.  And maybe it was because some bad shit went down when I left.  Maybe it’s because there’s a lot of bridges I need to rebuild that I never have.  Maybe I started seeing myself turning into a Professional Slacker and I realized I needed to get the hell out while I still had a chance.  That I got scared, and ended up pissing a bunch of people off because of it.  Well.  Again.  Maybe.

            And of course, “blow Saturday” in David’s sentence meant “Let’s get in my car and drive the seven hours to go to Columbia Missouri this Saturday morning, shall we?”

            Hmm.  A slacker wedding, held at a place I ran away from, filled with people who were still pissed at me for doing so.

            How could I say no?





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1997



12:30 PM. We are hitting the road.  We were supposed to hit the road by 10:30, but, well, you know, we got a little behind and things happened:  MS#1.  I’ve decided that, throughout my journal, I will mark a little "MS" after each sentence that describes a way that I used to live my life, a mark that will show what the lifestyle of a Missouri Slacker is all about, how the habits start slowly coming back to me as the weekend progresses.

            Our traveling companion is Mendy, a woman who also lives in Chicago and who also was an MS in a previous life.  We did not know each other in our pre-Big Shoulders days, but we did have the exact same set of mutual friends.   These things happen when you live in a SlackerTown.  It is one of the many definitions I promised earlier.



4:00 PM. We are sitting on the concrete that constitutes the gutter of Highway 55, running the length of Chicago to St. Louis, containing the 240 other miles of vast wasteland, the most wretched plains of land ever to curse the face of this earth.  The more reserved of you refer to it as "Illinois."

            We are out of gas.  Yes, like something out of a bad teenage slasher flick.  Mendy’s gas needle doesn’t work, they were trying to stretch the gas out to the Dixie Truck Stop and Diner near Peoria, and we fell short about two miles from the exit.  David is currently heading to the gas station, the passenger/victim of a friendly Illinois farmer.  Mendy and I are sitting on top of the car, watching a man drive an antique bright yellow plane over our heads a half dozen times, dusting the crops next to us.

            The yellow plane is a bit of an epiphany to Mendy and I.  We had figured (we admitted to each other) that with such a rise in technology in the recent years, that some sort of more efficient way of dusting crops would have been invented.  It’s a shock to know that some of the incredibly old-fashioned ways are still the BEST ways.  We have decided that the gas loss and the plane sighting are good omens for the trip.  Of course, we’re not the ones who had to hitchhike to the gas station.  We wonder aloud about whether David has been kidnapped by the psycho farmer.

            Mendy and I enter into further discussion.  It turns out that we went to the same high school -- actually lived about ten minutes away from each other almost our entire childhoods, but never met: MS#2.  We eventually spy David, walking down the road, his t-shirt in his back pocket, singing "100 Bottles of Beer On the Wall" really loudly, looking like an extra from a Bon Jovi video.  We are on our way again.



10:00 PM. I am stoned.  Very very stoned.  MS#3.

            We pulled up to our hosts’ house about 8:30 tonight.  It’s three of them -- Indira, Sam and Kelly.  Indira and Kelly have lived together for a long time and have always gotten along, and then Kelly started dating Sam and eventually Sam moved in to save on rent.  They are people who I don’t know, who are too young FOR me to know, but they are the kids who have taken over the ‘cool’ spot of the Columbia population that David and I and Mendy once occupied ourselves.

            There is a curious way that people join the culturally elite in a SlackerTown, different from most other cities.  Most SlackerTowns have a series of hotspots, retail places that become the regular hangouts of the MS’s.  They differ from town to town, and usually from year to year: when I was in school, the "uberstores" included Shattered, a local danceclub; The Blue Note, the local alternative live band club; Shakespeare’s Pizza, which is the slacker pizza place right by campus; Streetside Records, the only record store in town that has cool albums; and then an assorted series of stores that would change every year -- coffeehouses, used clothing stores, used record shops, the latest overpriced restaurant.

            These are not fabulous jobs when you work at the Uberstores -- just like any other Slacker profession, it consists mostly of making shit for customers, cleaning up the customers’ shit, taking a lot of shit from customers, and then a lot of sweeping and mopping once the place closes.  Likewise, there’s nothing special about the pay at the uberstores either -- to get an idea of salary in a collegetown, consider the fact that in 1993, I was damn lucky to get a job at the new Kinko’s, because it was one of the only places in the entire town that started you at $5.50 an hour.  Of course, my rent was $100 bucks a month, too.  But more on that later.

            Somehow or other, though, these uberstores develop as THE places to work, and the challenge to get hired on becomes monumental.  Once during college, Shakespeare’s put a flyer in the window saying "NOW HIRING," and by twelve hours later they had a hundred applications.  At a place like Streetside or Shattered, there WERE no public notices; on the rare occasions that a person would quit, they would literally hand-pick their successor, much like royalty.

            Lest you believe this to be just a snotty pretentious attitude by those employees with no merit behind it, let me just tell you that these people really WERE treated like royalty in Columbia.  Now, places like The Blue Note and Shattered I can understand, because becoming friends with those people could guarantee you free drinks, no cover charges, and getting to cut in line.  But the employees at these places were treated (are treated) with much more of a sense of awe and reverence than those fringe benefits warranted; and for a place like Shake’s or Streetside, where nothing free could be gained, I NEVER understood their entry into the Uberstore category.

            SlackerTowns are notorious for this -- fame and reward for the most arbitrary, self-fabricated reasons, not for any kind of actual accomplishment or merit.  This is another large reason why I was compelled to leave.

            So, Indira and Sam and Kelly were part of the indie Blue Note crowd now, even though I didn’t know them.  "Different faces, same wardrobe," as David says.  The three of them are just old enough now to be tired of the loud and crazy Student Ghetto of east campus, a six block grid of houses where the majority of the independent undergraduates live.  They are all approaching twenty-five now, and like their compatriots, have moved a little past downtown to small rural roads with names like "Hinkson" and "Paris" and "West Boulevard," places with gardens in the back and lots of room for the dog, places where you can rent an entire house, front to back, basement to attic, for $500 a month.

            Walking into the Sam, Indira and Kelly (SIK) house was like walking into an ages-old checklist of what a Slacker household should be like: black and white film still poster of David Bowie from "The Hunger" propped in the corner; defunct stereo receiver in the fireplace; hodgepodge of used and mismatched retro furniture tastefully placed around the house; library of old textbooks, seminal literature, and healthy collection of Henry Rollins and Bukowski; cheerfully cluttered kitchen, mismatched silverware, and overflowing recycling bin; and a mass of CDs that reach staggering proportions.

            One of the things that I had completely forgotten was how all-important and all-pervasive music was in my life, how it provided an almost-constant soundtrack to the plotline which was my MS experience.  I forgot it until the moment I spied a record player in the living room (a record player!), a stack of vinyl sitting next to it (vinyl!) and I suddenly realized how incredibly quiet it seemed in that house without some music going.

            Indie rock and retro vinyl is just a way of life in a SlackerTown, something as inherent to your day-to-day existence as eating or breathing.  There’s really no question about it -- almost all of my friends worked at one time or another for the campus radio station, or Streetside Records, or the Blue Note, or were regional reps for major labels, or ran an indie label out of their living room, or were in a band that toured every summer and blew into South By Southwest in Austin every March and wowed the crowd.  That was it, that was the shit, the one point in common for all of us -- the ability to out-hip each other’s references, the ability to out-retro each other in vinyl collection, the ability to get backstage after a concert at the Blue Note, hang out with the band, and ending up letting someone like Pavement crash on your floor that night.  The stereo started up about twenty minutes after we got into town (Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66) and never stopped the entire time we were there.

            The SIK House is, of course, a pot house, and I had an opportunity very early on to brush up on my bong skills: MS#4.  That’s something else about Columbia that differs from Chicago -- people are really, really into their pot culture.  They know how to roll the perfect oversized joint from two or three rolling papers stuck together; they know how to mix in the perfect blend of tobacco to make the smoke much smoother; they are conditioned to automatically grab the bong and hide it behind the couch every time there’s a knock at the door.  SlackerTowns are, at the heart, always HippieTowns too, and even if you are not a hippie and just want to kick a hippie’s ass everytime you see a pair of Birkenstocks, you are nonetheless infused with a bit of the hippie lifestyle just by being there, such as smoking a lot of pot, enjoying the occasional guitar-based country rock show, and going camping on April weekends.

            Sam and I are in the middle of a very stoned conversation.  He is a sound engineer, for both live shows and recording sessions, and he is telling me how he feels that he’s just about reached the upper limit of what he can do here in Columbia, how he feels that it’s about time that he moves on.  On the other hand, he has a good gig at the Blue Note, the money comes in, it’s a nice town to be in, a pleasant town, a cheap town.  He just doesn’t quite know what to do.  I attempt to tell him that getting out should be one of his biggest priorities right now... but I try to tell him this without being insulting or seeming that I’m bigger than him for being able to do it myself.  But of course, I’m stoned out of my gourd and have no idea if I’m succeeding.



11:15 PM. After sitting around the SIK House for another two hours, eating rice with too many spices mixed in, listening to Indira say multiple times, "Oh God, I don’t want to go downtown AGAIN tonight" and trying to convince her through the THC haze that we are in from out-of-town and that we WANT to go downtown, we finally head out.

            Here’s how Columbia’s liquor laws work:  You can sell alcohol until 1:30 a.m., Monday through Saturday.  No package liquor can be sold on Sunday; restaurants can sell through midnight on Sunday, but only if a certain percentage of their income comes from food sales.  As a result, the bars all close around 1 to 1:15 in the morning, in a vain attempt to get all the drunken undergraduates chased out by 1:30 (it never works).

            I am doing the 9th Street Shuffle tonight, 9th Street being the cultural "main street" of Columbia, the street filled with all the alternative bars, the cool coffeehouses, the used record stores that all the MS’s go to on a regular basis.  The Blue Note is at the northern tip of downtown 9th St., Shattered on the southern tip, right before you hit the campus proper.  It’s funny, because Cherry St., the cross-street where Shattered is located, also contains Columbia’s two largest fraternity bars, Harpo’s and Deja Vu, each about two blocks on either side of Shattered.  As you can imagine, at about 1:30 each morning, when all the fraternity people are meandering east and west looking for their friends, and all the slackers are meandering north and south doing the same thing, the intersection of 9th and Cherry is not the most pleasant thing sometimes.

            Shattered and the Blue Note have oddly similar histories, which of course mirrors the history of alternative culture in the last twenty years in general, yet have many opposite specifics in their history.  The two clubs are hooked together in Columbia MO lore so much that they are inseparable.  Like peanut butter and jelly.  Mobile homes and tornadoes.  Or Maria and loud.  If you were a habituate of Shattered, you would have gotten that last inside joke.

            Shattered opened in the early eighties as a shitty underground biker/drug/loser club in the basement of a dilapidated downtown mall.  It went through a bit of a identity crisis in its first few years -- a combination of new wave danceclub, host of live punk shows (among others, Black Flag and Circle Jerks played there in the heyday of the scene), and sole purveyor of industrial music in the late ‘80s, when my friends and I first started going, we of course being obsessed with the sweet, evil sounds of Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, Thrill Kill Kult, and all those other wonderful bands, like any good art major in the late ‘80s was.

            Shattered is owned by Johnnie Hodges, although popular rumor still persists that he is a puppet owner for the Mafia in California, and that Shattered exists to launder drug money from the coast.  Frankly, I’ve never been able to either confirm or deny this rumor, even though one of my roommates was the general manager of Shattered at one point in school.  The fact of the matter is that, in fifteen years of existence, Shattered has never once replaced the dancefloor light or sound system, never does promotions, doesn’t advertise (barring the occasional flyer on downtown kiosks) and in general has remained the shitty underground bar that it’s always been.  Now, is this because the club was created so that it wouldn’t garner any attention to itself, or is it this hypercasual attitude that made it the popular club that it is?  I leave the analysis to you.