Gary is rubbing Jane’s arms up and down to keep her warm when finally the line starts to move. Then about five seconds later, we see this kid looking heartbroken, and he’s precisely the kind of small-blond-tan guy Tiny Cooper would like, and so Tiny says, “What’s wrong?” And then the kid answers, “It’s over twenty-one only.”
“You,” I tell Tiny, stammering. “You bitchsquealer.” I still don’t know what it means, but it seems appropriate.
Tiny Cooper purses his lips and furrows his brow. He turns to Jane. “You got a fake ID?” Jane nods. Gary pipes up, “Me too,” and I’m tensing my fists, my jaw locked, and I just want to scream, but instead I say, “Whatever, I’m going home,” because I don’t have a fake ID.
But then Tiny says real fast and real quiet, “Gary, hit me as hard as you can in the face when I’m showing my ID, and then, Grayson, you just walk behind me like you belong in the joint,” and then no one says anything for a while, until Gary says, too loud, “Um, I don’t really know how to hit.” We’re getting close to the bouncer, who has a large tattoo on his bald head, so Tiny just mumbles, “Yes you do. Just hit me hard.”
I lag back a little, watching. Jane gives her ID to the bouncer. He shines a flashlight on it, glances up at her, and hands it back. Then it’s Tiny’s turn. I take a series of very quick, short breaths, because I read once that people with a lot of oxygen in their blood look calmer, and then I watch as Gary gets on his tiptoes and rears his arm back and wallops Tiny in the right eye. Tiny’s head jerks back, and Gary screams, “Oh my God, ow ow, shit my hand,” and the bouncer jumps up to grab Gary, and then Tiny Cooper turns his body to block the bouncer’s view of me, and as Tiny turns, I walk into the bar like Tiny Cooper is my revolving door.
Once inside, I look back and see the bouncer holding Gary by the shoulders, and Gary grimacing while staring at his hand. Then Tiny puts a hand on the bouncer and says, “Dude, we were just f**king around. Good one though, Dwight.” It takes me a minute to figure out that Gary is Dwight. Or Dwight is Gary.
The bouncer says, “He f**king hit you in the eye,” and then Tiny says, “He owed me one,” and then Tiny explains to the bouncer that both he and Gary/Dwight are members of the DePaul University football team, and that earlier in the weight room Tiny had spotted poorly or something. The bouncer says he played O-Line in high school, and then suddenly they’re having a nice little chat while the bouncer glances at Gary’s extrarordinarily fake ID, and then we are all four of us inside the Hideout, alone with Neutral Milk Hotel and a hundred strangers.
The people-sea surrounding the bar parts and Tiny gets a couple of beers and offers me one. I decline. “Why Dwight?” I ask. And Tiny says, “On his ID, he’s Dwight David Eisenhower IV.” And I say, “Where the frak did everyone get a fake ID anyway?” and then Tiny says, “There are places.” I resolve to get one.
I say, “Actually, I will have a beer,” mostly because I want something in my hand. Tiny hands me the one he’s already started in on, and then I make my way up close to the stage without Tiny and without Gary and without Possibly Gay Jane. It’s just me and the stage, which is only raised up about two feet in this joint, so if the lead singer of Neutral Milk Hotel is particularly short—like if he is three feet ten inches tall—I will soon be looking him straight in the eye. Other people move up to the stage, and soon the place is packed. I’ve been here before for all-ages shows, but it’s never been like this—the beer that I haven’t sipped and don’t intend to sweating in my hand, the well-pierced, tattooed strangers all around me. Every last soul in the Hideout right now is cooler than anyone in the Group of Friends. These people don’t think there’s anything wrong with me—they don’t even notice me. They assume I am one of them, which feels like the very summit of my high school career. Here I am, standing on an over-twenty-one night at the best bar in America’s second city, getting ready to be among a couple hundred people who see the reunion show of the greatest no-name band of the last decade.
These four guys come out onstage, and while they don’t bear a striking resemblance to the members of Neutral Milk Hotel, I tell myself that, whatever, I’ve only seen pictures on the web. But then they start playing. I’m not quite sure how to describe this band’s music, except to say that it sounds like a hundred thousand weasels being dropped into a boiling ocean. And then the guy starts singing:
She used to love me, yeah
But now she hates
She used to screw me, bro
But now she dates
Other guys
Other guys
Barring a prefrontal lobotomy, there’s absolutely no way that the lead singer of Neutral Milk Hotel would ever think, let alone write, let alone sing, such lyrics. And then I realize: I have waited outside in the cold gray-lit car-exhausted frigidity and caused the possible broken bones in Gary’s hand to hear a band that is, manifestly, not Neutral Milk Hotel. And although he is nowhere amid the crowd of hushed and stunned NMH fans surrounding me, I immediately shout, “Damn you, Tiny Cooper!”
At the end of the song, my suspicions are confirmed when the lead singer says, to a reception of absolute silence, “Thank you! Thanks very much. NMH couldn’t make it, but we’re Ashland Avenue, and we’re here to rock!” No, I think. You’re Ashland Avenue and you’re here to suck. Someone taps me on the shoulder then and I turn around and find myself staring at this unspeakably hot twenty-something girl with a labret piercing, flaming red hair, and boots up her calves. She says, askingly, “We thought Neutral Milk Hotel was playing?” and I look down and say, “Me—” I stammer for a second, and then say “too. I’m here for them, too.”
The girl leans into my ear to shout above the atonal arrhythmic affront to decency that is Ashland Avenue. “Ashland Avenue is no Neutral Milk Hotel.”
Something about the fullness of the room, or the strangeness of the stranger, has made me talkative, and I shout back, “Ashland Avenue is what they play to terrorists to make them talk.” The girl smiles, and it’s only now that I realize that she’s conscious of the age difference. She asks me where I’m in school, and I say “Evanston,” and she says, “High school?” And I say, “Yeah but don’t tell the bar-tender,” and she says, “I feel like a real pervert right now,” and I say, “Why?” and she just laughs. I know the girl isn’t really into me, but I still feel marginally pimping.