Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

So what if Cat Stevens reverberates against the walls of a dilapidated farmhouse now and again? If it is forever the sun-drunk “Morning Has Broken” and never the more apt and suburban “Father and Son” it cannot count for much; it will hardly drown out the other, more horrible sounds heard there. 1aWhat we got from the radio in my room was not exactly an antidote to this bucolic sickness, for Richmond and Charlottesville alike beamed out at us no end of field- and stream-themed rock, yet for every assault on our souls by Poco or the Little River Band there was at least a palliative in some effort by an odder outfit to agitate and console us.

Should I therefore proceed to list the thirty or so bands that “meant the most” to me during my adolescence, ceding for the duration of that list all music of mine to chance and addled namers? should I pay special attention to what is claimed now, by bespectacled and aging salarymen, to have been the proper choices then? should I bend my memories to suggest that an ignorant pseudo-farmboy might actually have cared about, and managed somehow to predict, what the conventional wisdom 1bwould be decades beyond his own childhood? Should I bravely claim that the bespectacled salarymen might have been off by a significant band or two, which half-honest stance would only legitimize the remainder of their lies and so work to confirm the slick orthodoxy that has risen up during the course of my lifetime to maximize record sales, which goal has always required the tempting of taste down the American death chute?

Perhaps, because it would seem “counterintuitive” and therefore especially brave, I might champion a band the salarymen have not shunned at all but rather too easily anointed (those sales figures cannot be ignored: they represent a generation listening, and a generation listened to: they are a generation listening to itself 1c), which the spectacle wearers deprived of salaries (interns in this equation) have all agreed, in open and easy rebellion against their more sold-out peers, to call crap, by which everyone else, from the salaryman to the “hip” listener unable anymore to trust his or her own ear, comes in time to understand is indeed crap.

Why not, then, go against salaryman and intern and listener alike? why not argue, with one’s own money derived from a hardly more subtle form of corporate entertainment (and one’s reputation from a peer group only slightly less impressed with, if no less annoyed by, the actual number of units shifted), that everyone is wrong here: the salaryman on account of a shallow cynicism, the intern on account of a shallow skepticism, and the listener on account of a fickle buoyancy in the wake of this silly debate, which cannot help but result in a compromise among the already compromised? Why not simply explain, with a couched concern for what face is thereby risked (which pose one imagines to be “refreshing” 1d), why this bit of craft with a guitar, or that bit of cleverness with a console, is worth far more, to anyone who with a pure heart hears it, than the backlist sales will ever show or deny? Why not claim that the open state of my hormonal template when I first heard those sounds could not possibly impeach the regard in which I hold them now? Why not confuse subjectivity with sentimentality, as so many have agreed to, and why not apply both idiocies to a commonplace end? Why not assume the mask of earnestness as if it were the same thing as honesty, and why not present this “honesty” as if it were the same thing as truth? That is (and I ask this with the utmost sensitivity, and honesty, and a heartfelt desire to be objective), why not lie? 1e

1aFrom which charge I exempt my mother’s Christmas music (Al Hirt, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, the Columbus Boychoir), as this was in every case excellent and hilarious, though I do wish it had not counted so firmly against my manhood that I cared about, and was occasionally able to pick out, those famous old melodies on the warped and untuned upright downstairs: boredom and dread will ofttimes lead to experimentation.

1bOne wet Christmas we received, from my mother’s wet parents, a gift subscription to three magazines of our own choosing, and my mother arranged for us to take Newsweek, National Geographic , and Rolling Stone . Who can argue now that I am anything more than the predictable result of that decision?

1cDoes the salaryman not himself hope to appear counterintuitive and brave?

1dOr can imagine a kind critic calling it such, like a Christmas gift begged and received!

1eWith ease I might do any and all of these things, except that I would then have to admit that my parents might have been right about me all along.

I would like to record that what follows took place at the McDonald’s on Patterson (a Richmond street but here extended westward into Henrico County, whence extended still it becomes Route 6, a manmade if feeble stake through the heart of Goochland), as this establishment later caught and enslaved so many I knew from my youthful days: the trumpeter above me in the marching band, who had no musical ability whatsoever yet was, and likely remains, wholly devoted to that martial instrument; the kid who first beat me senseless on a Virginia schoolbus and now took my order with the same stark and pissed-off eyes that had prefaced all his punches; at a certain point my own brother, whom I would watch and wait for in a relaxed position on the hood of a parked pickup, while through the panes he mopped and scraped toward the end of his shift, so that we might at least drive home together, laughing at his lot, and mine no better, under dark skies but remarkably bright stars.

Unfortunately, the scene I intend is properly set a few miles off, at the Hardee’s in the Regency Square mall, on my break from a job at the Rite Aid pharmacy there, from which Richmond’s West End never seemed to need anything except cigarettes and maxipads. The memoirists, I know, and most of the journalists, would probably go ahead and claim that the incident occurred at the McDonald’s on Patterson, given the wealth of further material connected with that site (and, of course, with its parent company), and simply bet against being found out, but that is the way of the coward and the fool. My scene belongs at the Regency Square Hardee’s not merely in the dull reporterish sense but also, as a modicum of imagination will show, in the sense of hot isolation from regular goings-on, in the sense of revelation where we may not want or expect it, in the sense of real or suspected country faggots being lent out to work suburban mall jobs at criminally small salaries until they can attract the attention of a sugar daddy, or else a professor, who will make them work a far sight harder for their pay.

As I stood in line at this particular Hardee’s, alternately bored and shocked by the custom all around me, I heard a familiar woodland voice say, as its source slid a tray toward a woman up front, “There you go, bitch, and I hope you choke on it. May I help you please? ” this last directed with fine drag timing at the next horrified diner in line, who then paid a dear amount for the simple Coke he wanted, and so on, until at last I stood before this hanging judge, and was greeted with the expected if unmeant “May I help you please?” and then heard, to the certain astonishment of anyone not already frightened off, “Oh hi there! How have you been?” I took his hand across the register and said that I was well, and asked how he and his people were doing, and was told that everyone was either dead or miserable or lying to themselves, after which we got on with the rest of the transaction. I asked for whatever Hardee’s had that pretended to be a Big Mac, and some fries, and as he slumped off to fetch my meal I could not help but peek behind the counter to see if he had any shoes on. He did, but I will be forgiven if I choose to remember it otherwise.