Feel so bad with the radio on

I cannot really stop myself from retelling this story. In a lot of ways, it perfectly defines my friendship with Schmeer circa 1989. Either that, or it was among the best twenty-two (or so) minute slabs of my life. I posted it on Facebook, but I will post it again here. In part because the Modern Lovers’ song is so very good. But also because maybe if I keep telling it over and over, the sheer ineffable perfection of that moment will ward off the queasy hollow cold that seeps in when I think about Karen’s death. Maybe if I rewrite it and rewrite it, like Orm and his frenetic OCD medieval poem, I can stave off its conclusion. One more time.

At the end of my year in Santa Cruz, after a strange and excellent summer living in Mill Valley with Gretchen, working at the Roastery and waiting each night for Gret to finish her shift at the Depot before biking home in the warm dry poppy-laden California air, there was a bit of a problem. I desperately wanted to get back to Portland, having not given up on my life there, panicked by my worst of all fears: missing out. But I had no car and certainly wasn’t flying home. Karen had this ingenious plan: she was already in Portland that summer, and she would come down, stay in Mill Valley for a few days, and we’d drive back to Portland together. Better still, Matthew and Katy could come. And they did. All three did.

We packed up the car with an assortment of my motley barrage of stuff—the remainder was staying on at 17 Plymouth MV—and we did not get an early start. It was August. The stretch up 101 can be trafficky and gross, though beautiful at the right time, and crossing 37 to 80 and then going through Vallejo and Vacaville was thick and East Bay hot. Then 505 turns into nothing: the malls give way to dry brown and the stretch up the valley is long, monotonous, and hard. The chatter and jokes gave way to long silent stretches. Agricultural machinery. Trucks. Matthew was done at Lincoln and what came next seemed very sketchy. Katy was going to Bates in Maine. Karen liked BU. Where we all were right then was like a weird time-out, or weird time back in. Dry fields. Bad country radio.

The afternoon had grown old when we finally broke free of the flat dry heat, and sped up I-5, on a clear and summer twilight, and just about where the freeway winds and climbs up from Lake Shasta. Karen plugged a tape in the stereo and blasting like the wind through the open windows at maximum volume came an old favorite, the Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’. It’s a hard song to sing along with, but we totally did. Karen leaned on the horn over and over. Shirts came off and were waved out the windows at the truckers we blew by, lungs were shredded as we shouted along with Jonathan. Fucking wild mercurial glory. Karen rewound several times. We were pouring through the coming night, I was with my best friends, and it was okay to stupidly yell ‘Radio on!’ over and over, on our way home. Maine and Boston and NY and Santa Cruz did not loom, just ponderosa woods and a long stretch of I-5 and unreal twilight.

Later that night we stopped in Weed, and the Hi-Lo for dinner, and drove on further, until we followed some signs up into some campsite in the pitch dark, which we found, when we woke up, was on the shore of a dried up lake. And later that summer, which we spent dorking around Portland as usual (downtown, shows, movies, parks, working, driving), Karen gave me a 30 minute per side tape. The label had been torn off—it had clearly been repurposed—and the case was just clear plastic. One song, over and over, like six or seven times per side: ‘Roadrunner’. I’ve been listening to it a lot again.

The Modern Lovers, 'Roadrunner'



Katy T., Matthew H., and I in the Hi-Lo in Weed, California, 1989. Photo by Karen Schmeer