This is a story.
When I was an undergraduate, I lived an interesting chapter of my life. For one thing, my mother was divorced from my step-father (who I will refer to as Mr. Piece of Shit) during my second semester, and I ended up going to a branch campus of IU to finish the bulk of my career. So I went to an open-admissions “community” style college that was, in many ways, like the TV show Community which I would become enchanted with later. But there weren’t many people my age there. This was exacerbated by the fact that while I wasn’t old, I was also non-traditional. The bulk of the students were either slightly younger than me (in that window of time where 17-21 is the magical “younger than” that gets weird) or significantly older than me (some of the students were in their 60s). My mother would start college on the same campus during my senior year; we even took a few classes together.
But what I wanted to talk about here is how I socialized during that time. One of my few actual peers was a female English major who I guess to most was my frenemy. She was quiet and mousy but not without her charms. We were the only two students in our class who tried harder than we needed to, so we ended up competing for honors and positions. It was weird and unhealthy. I guess she was Annie and I was Abed.
Anyway, one of the things I did to have some peer social time was going to poetry readings/slams in Indy with her and a few of her art school friends from Indianapolis. One of the places we went to– I liked to say we haunted it because it was dark and full of terrors– was this little Irish pub just past the hip part of Broad Ripple circa 1999, which is to say it was a pretty blue-color neighborhood to have a bunch of IUPUI art school students reading what seemed like beat poetry.
One thing you have to understand about me. I married a poet (not the mousy one :P). I love SOME poetry. But on the whole, I think MFA student poetry is hot garbage, usually pretentious and at this particular reading/slam there were people who clung to similar motifs (for months all the poems had the internal phrase “sweet meats,” for months after that everyone was talking about goats, and at one point everyone talked about being a moth to flame). I didn’t like the slams much at all. The people reading and asking for feedback usually weren’t bad, but when people got all possessive and white-kid-rap-battle-y, it wasn’t much fun.
One night I was sitting at the back, as I usually did when Mousy Poet went up to do her thing, I ended up sitting next to a dude in a hoodie that looked really familiar. He, like me, thought the poets that night were sub-par. I can’t remember how it came up, but eventually he told me why he looked familiar: he was Iggy Pop’s brother. I was a little starstruck (I guess I thought it extended to families, right Lil Dickie?), but as the night droned on and on he and I turned to talking about music. Finally, feeling the snarky goodness of sitting with the sibling of a legit music icon, I took to my once-a-month social commentary on the group.
I’d get up once a month during the slam and do a dramatic reading of something that wasn’t dramatic. The first time I did the “Harriet” spoken word poem from So I Married an Axe Murderer, and I think a few of them recognized it. The next time I recited the lyrics to “Anna Begins” by Counting Crows in a sort of angry beat poet style. Once I did a verse of Where is My Mind then a verse of Know your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine.
This night, though, I stood up on the edge of the stage. I smirked at Mousy Poet. And slowly, Shatner-like, I proclaimed:
“I am a passenger. And I ride. And. I. Ride.” Then I ended up doing a misheard lyrics version of “South Side” by Moby. At the back of the room, my new friend chuckled, as amused as I was that no one in the room seemed to notice that I was invoking two rather famous musicians. Or maybe they all noticed and thought it was brilliant and not me mocking their sweet meat goats to the flame.
We all went to an all-night diner and had breakfast while listening to stories about growing up in the shadow of Iggy Pop. It was fascinating, and we discovered over the course of things that we had mutual friends in the music world, one of which was the producer I’ve mentioned before who I talked with two or three times a week for years. It was a fun time. I want to say we saw him again, because I think we did, but I really can’t remember other nights with him at the poetry slam. I’ll be honest, there are times I think this story was just a dream. I’d be positive it was all in my head except that I went back years later to take a photo of where I carved “Jesus hates a lefty” into the booth wall on a bet. I didn’t drink at all then (and I’ve still never been drunk), so I can’t claim it was an alcoholic haze. It just seems weird that this happened, just like it seems weird that one night Ricky Williams beat me at Madden on Xbox Live or that I met the Ultimate Warrior playing wrestling role-playing games on AOL. Or that Adam Duritz called me up to the stage by name and had me sign rounds of “Oh Suzanna” with him when the power went out at the Eastwood Theatre during their concert. These things happen to other people. Or they don’t happen at all, in fact.
They say community school students don’t get the proper college experience. What is more fundamentally art-school-nerd than dank Pop sibling Poetry Slam and Eggs? Nothing, I say. Nothing.
And if you’re wondering, no, I never thought to doubt his story. He knew enough about people that it seemed like he should know that I didn’t really care. I never tried to confirm or deny. What’s the fun in that?