BACK IN PORTLAND,
SOME YEARS AGO NOW . . .

. . . I lived in a small grey house shaped like a shoebox with my brothers Matt and Kerwin. It was right on Hawthorne Boulevard, just a little ways east of the Hawthorne Bridge. The three of us spent a harrowing year there penniless and increasingly isolated and lonely, subsisting on rice and black beans and fruit, and finding solace only in our Sunday ritual of eating dinner and marionberry pie at a place called Tom’s Diner. That winter we got hit with a double blizzard, one right after the other in the same week, and we kept a fire going in our fireplace for two weeks straight to stay warm. By the end of February, when the streets were lined with black snow and hypodermic needles, we figured that was probably the end of us. I started walking around Lone Fir Cemetery at night looking for places where they could toss me into the ground once the Good Lord had beckoned me home.

And then one day, in a subterranean PIT of my UTTERMOST DESPAIR, I got an email from a guy at a publishing company back home in Oakland asking me to come on down for an interview. I had applied for a publishing assistant gig there on a lark, thinking it’d go absolutely nowhere, and I’d almost forgotten all about it. Thing is, I was desperate to go back to Oakland to be with my friends, so getting that interview was the best thing that had happened to me in a year or more, and I don’t even remember what the last good thing had been. I asked Matt if we could take his car down to California so I could see the man who wanted to talk to me about the job. Back then we were always looking for some excuse to go somewhere, anywhere, even if it meant the trip itself would be more fun than the actual destination, which is often the case, and which was just fine with us. Hell, it was just nice to have something to do . . .

Unsurprisingly, Matt was game to honk on down to Skeleton Town. And so we loaded up his car with our backpack and sleeping bags and filled my thermos with black coffee to make the ten-hour drive down the West Coast to get to Oakland and hang out for a little while after my interview. We had not been in the Bay Area since the previous October, which was the longest amount of time I had ever been away from Oakland since I first started going to Oakland.

Before we took off, I went down into Kerwin’s room in the basement, where he was living with us secretly / illegally, by which I mean our landlord had no idea he existed. I felt real bad for Kerwin on account of his room being pretty sad and grungy. Because the basement wasn’t especially habitable, what with it having concrete walls and a concrete floor, and being in Portland where it rains 8–9 months out of the year, it was a little damp down there. Matt and I had laid down laminate floors and painted the walls with waterproof paint, and had hung up curtains to create a little space for him, but it was still a creepy old basement that smelled weird and was almost certainly infested with mind-altering black mold spores. In short, it was essentially uninhabitable, and yet there he was inhabiting it.

So it was little surprise to me that when I stomped down the creaky wooden stairs leading to Kerwin’s moldy dungeon that day, he was attempting to cheer himself up and make his room cheerful by blasting music that that felt to me like summertime. Said I to Kerwin: “We’re going to California and will be back in three days. Hold down the fort. And feel free to sleep in my room.” I listened to the music for a few seconds.

I said, “Man what is this? This rules.”

TO WHICH KERWIN REPLIED:

“Oh, uh, it’s this band called SPORTS.” And he showed me the cover, which was instantly nostalgic to me even though I had never seen it before:

I thought three things: 1) SPORTS is a really good band name, 2) an album cover that is just a grainy digital-camera-quality picture of a dude smokin and walking through an unknown and yet still familiar wintry American suburb with a little girl’s tricycle is also good, and 3) this is definitely a Midwestern / East Coast band.

I then stored SPORTS away in the filing cabinet of my mind. I bid farewell to dour Kerwin and went upstairs and hopped into Matt’s car. We hit the highway going 100 mph out that godforsaken city headed south towards glorious California, to good ol Oakland, the “Go Ahead and Put That Anywhere” capital of the world, and a place I desperately wanted to get back to on a permanent basis on account of how bad my life had been in Portland.

Hours later, at my favorite gas station just outside Ashton, Oregon, near the California border, a place I like a lot actually, where you can fill your thermos with hot black coffee for FREE, I remembered SPORTS and put on that album Kerwin had been playing in his room. Matt was into it. We rolled down the windows and drove through downtown Ashton just for the hell of it. And once we hit I-5 again, we blasted the entire album twice in a row. Matt said, “Man, this is good stuff.”

We pulled into the East Bay late that night and stayed with dear Tracey at my old house in North Oakland where she and world-famous painter Sam Spano lived. Being in that house again made me a little sad, and yet it strengthened my resolve: the only way to unfuck my life was to nail that job interview. And so next morning early I put on a black button-down shirt and Matt dropped me off at the publishing company on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley where I had my interview. He said he’d wait for me on University Avenue in Berkeley, where he’d be hanging out at a coffeeshop that no longer exists until I was finished making my final bid to keep the Grim Reaper at bay a little longer.

I rang the doorbell and a woman opened the door. I told her my name and she led me into the building, which felt enormous . . . it had large wooden triangular ceiling about 20 feet high, with exposed wooden beams decorated with Japanese lanterns and wind chimes and Christmas lights. The ceiling was dotted with skylights that let in diffused California sunshine. There were no overhead lights to speak of and the place was comfortingly quiet in the way a library is. It felt like being inside a cathedral. The dude who was to interview me—a guy named Neo, who is a good friend of mine now—he shook my hand and lead me into a large meeting room lined with bookshelves and closed the sliding doors. We sat down across from each other and he regarded me kindly. Neo kind of looked like Buddy Holly if Buddy Holly had made it to his mid-50s. For some reason this put me at ease. And then I had what I think was one of the easiest job interviews of my life. It wasn’t very technical and it was certainly informal . . . just two guys talking. At the end, Neo said: “You remind me of myself when I was younger.” Whenever an older dude says this to you, it can go either way. If someone is especially terrible, you get nervous and start to worry about yourself. But Neo seemed like a great dude. Thought I: “Cool . . .”

And then he said a thing that seemed especially auspicious to me: “Hey man, I really enjoyed talking to you. You’ll hear from me again by next week . . .” I could tell he was being utterly sincere. I told him the feeling was mutual and then he led me through the dimly lit cathedral-like building and back out into what was one of those perfect Bay Area spring days I had missed so dearly. And although the sun had made me its enemy since my earliest childhood, I stood beneath it with my eyes closed and allowed myself to feel a dangerous thing, which is Hope.

I called Matt and let him know our mission was more or less a success. I had done all I could do and now I would have to wait and see if what I had done had been enough. Matt told me to standby for evac. I found some shade at the corner store across the street, a place that used to be called Johnny’s. In no time I saw Matt rocketing down Shattuck Avenue towards me. He pulled up to the curb and I got in. We both had to work our miserable jobs in Portland the next day, so we made a joint ruling that we ought to just head back up to Portland right then and there. We were hip about time, but we just had to go. At a nearby gas station we filled our thermoses with crappy coffee and headed towards 580 North towards El Cerrito and Richmond to get to I-5. As we took the entrance ramp by the Emeryville Trader Joe’s, I asked Matt if we could play SUNCHOKES again, to which he replied: “Dude. Of course.”

A week later, through some air-thin miracle, I received an email from Neo asking me to come back in for a second interview the following Monday. I had previously told Neo that I was “between Portland and Oakland” and in the process of moving back, which was technically true, although that of course hinged on me getting the gig with him. Returning to Oakland on such short notice was gonna be a huge and expensive pain in the ass on account of me having to call out of work at the bar / restaurant where four days a week I hated myself for $11 an hour.

So I told the endearing cokeheads I worked with that I had the flu and flew back to Oakland using some flight credit my sister had given me. I could hear the toll of Death’s bell in the depths of my collapsing soul, and knew I was living on BORROWED TIME furnished by THE GOOD LORD ABOVE. My entire life depended on my getting that job.

At my second interview, Neo simply slid a contract across the table and told me the job was mine if I wanted it. All I had to do, he said, was SIGN on the LINE which was DOTTED. I looked at the offered salary. It was twice as much money as I’d ever made in my life up until that point, which is not saying much. I also got PTO and sick days and health insurance. I nearly screamed. I did not tell Neo that he had just saved me from the infinite darkness that absorbs even time, so I picked up a nearby pen and signed the contract as quickly as possible. Rather than make a pact with the devil, I felt I have added my own name to the Book of Life. Neo asked if I could start on Monday the following week, which was impossible since I still lived in Portland with Dante and had no place to live in Oakland. I bought myself two weeks by telling him I had to briefly go back up to Portland to clean and pack, which was not untrue. He said that was just fine and we shook hands. I departed the building and kissed the pavement.

You’d have thought I’d just been given a million-dollar contract by the way I strutted down the street towards downtown Berkeley with balls the size of Jupiter. Suddenly I was no longer a human cockroach, when I had awoken that same morning as one. Now I could pay off my many debts to the creeps I owed and go to a dentist and see a doctor, and on and on. I could get a decent apartment and eat decent food and I’d never have to work on a weekend again. No more black-mold-infested walls and POW camp gruel. And they would pay me even if I went on vacation or felt too sick to work. This was all a total novelty to me. Soon I would escape the gloom of Portland I had thought I would dig, as well as its sickening mildness I had come to despise . . . I was going back to California to soar out of the blackest gorges and become invisible in the sunny spaces . . .

And so saying, I took my headphones out of my pocket and walked the mile towards campus listening to SUNCHOKES.

That very same day, I signed a lease for an apartment right on the Oakland-Berkeley border, in a quiet hidden hobbit house shaded by flowers and trees. The place had a backyard and everything. Kerwin and I had agreed to continue being roommates once we got back to the East Bay, and now it was so, made official by our wet signatures upon the perforated page. That night I flew to Portland and boxed up all my things. That Monday the two of us (plus Dante) drove a rented minivan out of Portland for the last time to our new place to live in perfect harmony in a city we never should have left in the first place. But what can you do. Thus began a beautiful era of my life, one which I miss deeply . . . and when I think back on it now I weep for its absence, as if I were bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead . . .

ANYWAY!

All that spring and all that summer I kept listening to SUNCHOKES. It just encapsulated how I was feeling at the time . . . It reminded me and continues to remind me of a time when the only thing that mattered was hanging out with my friends, and hanging out with a girl I liked and who liked me back, whomever that may have been at the time, I won’t say. There is a sort of “summer after graduating from high school” feeling to it. It has been eight years since I left Portland and went back to the East Bay, and nineteen years since I graduated from high school and left my hometown. In my mind, there is a spiritual connection between these two points in time. These were the halcyon days. In the distant past, I had a car and a girlfriend and not much money, but also total freedom . . . a glorious endless summer rolled out before me from here to the distant horizon. I could go anywhere and do anything and somewhere someone was waiting to see me again and I her. The happy highways where I went kept going on and on until they finally ended at the edge of the abyss, as they always do.

But this album is that whole feeling frozen in time. These are songs about Saturday, driving around, hanging out, doing nothing, sleeping in someone’s arms, loving someone, missing someone, dreaming of someone . . . breaking up and getting back together again, something I don’t have the stomach or time for anymore, but I still romanticize that sort of thing just the same . . .

SPORTS became REMEMBER SPORTS on account of some other band already had the name and had gotten more popular. The next two albums they put out are nearly as good, but I just really dig that first one. There is something so pure and sincere about it. These kids ain’t exactly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but then so what? They just sound like some nerds from a small town in Ohio who have part-time barista gigs and roommates and who experience winter and make albums in their garages and tour when they can even if they break even. I like how unpolished they sound and the lead singer’s voice is always cracking when she tries to hit high notes. Their music is utterly unpretentious in that way. Listen, I love it!

I’ve seen them live exactly once, which was at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. I went with my friend Kelsey. We were amazed that no one had their phone out recording the show, which is something that always ruins going to shows now. As a teenager I drove to the 9:30 Club in DC on school nights, and years later as Lone Star chugging adult I went to shows several nights a week at pretty much every small venue in Austin when I lived there. That show in January 2019 reminded me of those kinds of shows where everyone was living in the Here and Now . . . Sorry, it’s just plain old better that way. And at one point some dumb jerks near the stage started moshing (this is absolutely not that kind of music), and the band stopped playing mid-song to tell them to knock it off, saying, “Is it not obvious that no one around you is enjoying you doing this?” Listen . . . I love it!

Well: embedded in this post for your convenience is the album I have just exhaustively written about for nearly 3,000 words. A few years back they remastered SUNCHOKES, but I recommend you listen to the original like I did exactly eight years ago now. I feel like its “whatever, man” production is one of the many things that makes it so special.

:,-)