Nurse the Hate: The Some Girls Story

It was obvious from the moment he entered the turn he would not make it.  The sheer weight of the Crown Victoria was roughly that of a World War 2 battleship.  To expect the car to turn sharply on the gravel road was at best optimistic and at the worst foolhardy.  I was sitting in the enormous back seat which was roughly the size of my first apartment.  Of course, I was not wearing a seatbelt.  I don’t even know if Crown Victorias that old had seatbelts as some sort of “Premium Safety Option” package.  This car was built in an age when safety was considered to be for cowards, children routinely hopped around moving vehicles like they were trampolines, and a considerate smoker slightly opened the side wedge window while plowing through a pack of smokes.  I held onto the strap by the window as my ass started to slide across the rich Corinthian leather seat.

The Rolling Stones “Some Girls” cassette was playing on the stereo.  At the time, this was the album favored by gentlemen our age as the line “…black girls just want to get fucked all night” in the title track seemed very edgy and we felt made us seem more worldly.  None of us actually knew if that was a fact regarding the sexual proclivities of African American women, but we assumed that since Mick Jagger said it, it was true.  Maybe that allowed us to think that the suburban white girls in our world didn’t really know what was going on, and their rejection of us had more to do with their poor sexual wiring than our own complete lack of qualities that would interest them.  Ignorance is bliss.  Sing on Mick.

The first couple of trees we knocked over were small.  Larger than saplings to be sure, but offering little resistance to the gigantic steel hulk sliding across scrub.  My eyes made contact with Chris who seemed to look right through me, the whites of the eyes never larger.  He looked like a caricature of himself.  Ron Wood’s tasteful slide guitar offered a nice compliment to the sound of the ground scraping under the car and thuds of objects bouncing off the side quarter panels.  We didn’t appear to be slowing down at all.  The speed we had maintained on the road, aggressive but certainly not beyond reason, seemed suddenly to be insanely reckless.  It’s all context really.  60 mph on the highway is slow, but is eye opening on a boat.

Moments earlier we had been talking over the din of “Some Girls” side one about the party the night before.  Wildly exotic girls had been at Dave’s house.  At this point in life “wildly exotic” meant they had attended a different high school.  A scandal had occurred when Sherry’s younger sister went in the other room with a different boy than expected, this action effectively shuffling the cards on all future potential couplings in the small social circle.  It was such a major event that it took precedence over the boy that had been dry humping Sherry’s even younger sister and had then ejaculated in his pants, the stained front of his jeans a combination of honor and shame.  The seemingly minor events of the evening had been dissected again and again, gone over like the Zapruder film.  This was now all forgotten as the car continued to slide through the woods.

It is interesting the suddenness that ends a car crash.  The long suspension of time through the slide ends as if a switch has been flipped.  The long moments of anxious loss of control give way to the quick inventory of your situation.  OK.  We’re stopped.  Fuck.  OK.  I think I’m OK.  Ow.  My head hurts.  Damn.  That’s going to be a knot on my head.  I think we’re OK though.  Yeah.  We’re OK.

The car had come to a sudden stop after the rear end smacked a large tree.  The back was dented in.  Mud decorated the car with diminishing thickness the higher up from the ground.  The front wheel was pushed in, and now would rotate in a completely off-kilter fashion in the unlikely event the car could be driven away from the accident site.  One of the guys was totally animated, offering an adrenalin fueled status report spiced with heavy profanity.  Chris looked on silently at his car, probably assessing the physical beating that would be inflicted from his stepfather.  “Before They Make Me Run” began inside the car’s stereo.  Keith Richards raspy vocals wafted out as the still running car made unnatural ticks and knocks.

Maybe it was the late afternoon sunlight today, or the unmistakable scent of Fall approaching in the air.  Whatever it was, when the iPod decided to play “Before They Make Me Run” this afternoon my mind went immediately back to that night.  I hadn’t thought about it in years, yet there was the memory like a new movie playing back across my brain.  That’s the power of music really.  It is like a key that unlocks a flood of memories or feelings.  All you have to do is pay attention. 

Tonight my band releases another full length.  I hope that just one person takes this record to heart, and it becomes a soundtrack to a moment in their life.  Years from now when whatever their newfangled music storage system plays one of our songs, they will think “I remember that night when I…”  I don’t know if Mick and Keith would care about my particular story, but if someone told that to me about our record, it would be my honor.