Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,29

room, and that this had made them feel unsafe. Mary Pat called me and said I was not allowed to come back to the meetings, but that I could talk to her in private sessions if I wanted, and that since all of my transgressions had taken place in bars or at house parties at which I’d been drinking, I should seek alcohol counseling.

Jeff handled being out on campus like a champ. He ended up being kind of an inspiration to other kids who were going through the same thing. The support group grew and grew, and soon there was the stirring of a strong, vibrant community that I wasn’t allowed to talk to.

And I became aware that I had fallen in love with a projection. When I tried to think about things I could say to Jeff to make it better, I couldn’t think of any, and I couldn’t think of any because I didn’t know him. He was the first beautiful boy—one of my people, one of the people I was trying to be—who could conceivably love me back in the same way, and I’d decided to endow him with every trait I was looking for in a boyfriend, whether he had them or not. Whether he wanted them or not.

In retrospect, it’s kind of like when you’re auditioning for something and the casting person is behind schedule. You end up sitting in the waiting room for much longer than you expected to. And because there’s nothing else to do—there’s a Coke machine and an old USA Today and the cell reception is shitty and there’s no Wi-Fi—you start to get in your head. You get nervous about this thing that you usually do with ease. You read over your lines too many times. You think about what you’re going to do with your hands. You think about what a gig like this one could do for you, what you’d do with the money. And when they finally call your name, you go in and just eat it. You talk too quickly, you talk too loudly, you oversell the joke in the script. You show the worst version of yourself. You want to run out of the place and never stop running. You’ve ruined it because you waited too long and you wanted it too much.

This was that kind of deal.

I threw all my love at a guy I barely knew, and it injured him. I wagged my tail so hard I knocked everything off the coffee table. The lucky thing was that this was happening right as Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories released their debut single “Stay (I Missed You),” which, by being plaintive and just vague enough, echoed my personal experience. I only heard what I wanted to, and I only wanted to hear that song, all day, every day.

Jeff and I never spoke again before I graduated, but I did make sure to ask all of his friends about him every time I saw them. One never knows when one is behaving like a creep; probably even that astronaut lady who drove for two days to beat up her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend didn’t think twice when she bought those adult diapers. It just felt right. Morrissey released the single “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” at just this moment—which I think you will agree is a very Morrissey thing to do—and it would have to join Suzanne Vega in the “listen later” pile.

That was a heavy couple of chapters. Thanks for sticking with me. As a reward, here is a photograph of a young Grant Show.

I spent my whole college career, and then most of the rest of my twenties, loving guys who were either constitutionally incapable of loving me back or wise enough to keep their distance. It was a dumb, exquisitely painful, self-destructive pattern that I seemed to enjoy. If it never led to any romantic or sexual satisfaction for me, if I lived my life in a perpetual state of frustration and heartache, at least it was predictable. I was a lot of fun to be around in the ’90s.

Here are a few of the songs that got me through it.

“Weak”—SWV

This one gets the early crush period down kind of perfectly; it’s a physical trauma, an affliction, and one you don’t want to shake off. You see a confident yet bookish senior pull out his word processor from across the library, you watch as he furrows his brow and