Devo

Almost exactly a year later, I stumbled across both pieces again. One of them, it turned out, was by Lene Lovich, and was called You Can’t Kill Me, lent to me by a compassionate acquaintance. The other I rediscovered while looking through the racks of a record store in St. Louis. I had heard some rumblings about this weird band out of Ohio called Devo and was looking through their releases (the third record, Freedom of Choice, was starting to get a little airplay with the catchy (and soon to be defining) Whip It). And there, listed as the last track on the first album, was the other missing piece – Shrivel-Up. I bought the record on the spot, and I took it back to my dad’s apartment.

I was visiting my dad for spring break. We used to get three weeks off at Christmas and during the spring, and I had planned to spend the whole time with him in St. Louis, where he had recently moved. The first week went swimmingly, but then the tensions started rising. It was a small apartment – one room, really, and we both shared the foldout couch – and the longer I was there, the smaller it got. He was full of plans for me to move there and spend my senior year in St. Louis, and I was full of plans for me not to do that. I hadn’t spent three years building up my friends and reputation at Interlochen to throw it away and become some anonymous geek in some urban high school in St. Louis for my last year. I had done a lot of work and was ready to reap my rewards. He argued that I would just be a big fish in a small pond and wouldn’t it be great to get out and swim the ocean with the sharks? He argued passionately about how great it would be and we could live together and I could get a job at McDonald’s (and here’s an application), and it just didn’t matter – there was no way I was going to leave Interlochen before graduation and I told him so. He dropped it, but I could tell he was disappointed. And pissed.

And the apartment got smaller and smaller. We spent every waking (and sleeping) moment together; I was taking dance class from him every day so I didn’t even get a break when he had to go to work. I knew what I had to do, but I dreaded doing it.

Halfway through the second week, I screwed up my courage and told him I wanted to go home early. That I needed a little time and space to myself, that I had spent all year living with a roommate and that I had a lot of homework I needed to do (I was dragging myself through Sons and Lovers at the time), and that, even though this trip had been great and it was wonderful to spend time with him, I really just wanted a few days to myself before the last, hectic spring term began.

And that was it; I had set off the bomb. He took this request, along with my unwillingness to drop my life and join his, as a rejection of him (which, to some degree, it was) and we got into the worst fight of our lives. There was lots of screaming and slamming and stomping around, but I held on tenaciously, determined to stick to my guns. Wounded, and in need to hurt me back, my father found a bomb of his own to drop, one that he hoped would kill me. He told me that I wasn’t his son. The shock waves crashed through that tiny apartment and knocked my knees out from under me, but it hadn’t worked. I knew he was lying. The bomb he dropped hadn’t killed me, it had killed him. My father was buried in the rubble and now before me stood a poor, lonely, weak, old man – desperate and scared. I had won. Hooray.

In the morning, we stopped at a travel agent to change my ticket. Now knowing that I was going home in a day instead of a week made everything suddenly bearable. If I could just get through he next 24 hours, I would be all right. But, boy, was it a long 24 hours. He moped and grumbled. He conspicuously tore up the schedule for the next week we had made and the application for McDonald’s I had begrudgingly filled out. He slept on the floor that night (I come by my martyrishness honestly), and in the morning, we walked silently over to the dance studio where he worked, he with his hands buried in his pockets and a deep frown carved into his face, me desperately clutching my new record. He had some errand to run and no turntable in his apartment, so he was going to unlock the studio for me (it was a holiday so there’d be nobody around), and then he’d come pick me up again later.

I sat in the quiet calm of the empty dance studio – a primal place of comfort for a child of dancers – and slipped my new record from its sleeve and set it on the turntable. I had never heard music like this. Everything was wrong. The music lurched and stumbled around, the lyrics were absurd and unsettling, the guitars clashed and crashed. These guys were about as far from cool as you could be – they were not only awkward, they were actually celebrating their awkwardness. The inner sleeve showed inscrutable pictures of men in diapers, or wearing plastic heads, or working in some nameless factory. The band was ugly in their plastic yellow jumpsuits and so unconcerned with the conventions of fame that they didn’t even have last names, just Mark and Alan and Jerry and Bob 1 and Bob 2. I knew I had entered some alternate universe, and I felt like I had come home. The music sounded like how I felt – jerky and confused and too smart and too stupid all rolled into one big bitter adolescent ball, careening wildly around a pinball table, crashing into bumpers and lighting up lights. I was not cool, I was not popular, and I was not willing to just take what was given to me, and Devo wrapped me in its fake plastic arms and let me know that I wasn’t alone. They weren’t popular either, and they were proud of it, and their unspeakable deconstruction of one of the primary icons of the rock and roll myth, the Rolling Stones' immortal and immoral Satisfaction, warmed me to my very core.

Eventually, I got to the moment I had been waiting for, the last song, the song I had first heard a year earlier in that dark dance performance. Shrivel-Up.