Hitting the Pavement

In the early hours of Thursday, Sep. 16, 2009, I received an e-mail from my friend Jeff with the subject line “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” Usually e-mails that begin this way are about delicious sandwiches one of us has just discovered, or YouTube videos of Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing acoustic guitar, or freshmen we want to like us.

This particular morning, however, the urgency was real, and Pavement—our favorite band, the group arguably responsible for our friendship—was reuniting for four shows in Central Park. The tickets were going on sale the following afternoon, and the shows would commence in a cool 370 days.

Many scoffed at their selling tickets an entire year before the shows were to transpire, but I shut my ears to such nonsense, the way people always do when their heroes behave questionably. We bought tickets for the Thursday and Friday shows in New York, and when they announced a nationwide tour in March, we nabbed front-row seats to the Boston show as well.

Seeing Pavement three times in six days seemed excessive to basically everyone I told, principally my parents, who never understood my affection for this band despite being surprisingly open-minded about most music (for parents). It is true that I had never attempted an undertaking quite this reckless, but it is equally true that no band has ever meant more to me than Pavement. In fact, back in those halcyon days of Facebook-stalking all your future classmates—before you realize that you will never see half of them in person and sheepishly delete them over Winter Break—Jeff friended me because I had Pavement listed on my profile. (This was also back when you could search for people by band or movie, which made finding new friends based on pretension significantly easier.)

My discovery of the band at age 15 coincided—quite beautifully, I thought at the time—with the formation of my closest high school friendship. We used to sit in her silver Volvo and listen to their records and lament being born too late to see them live (we were all of 10 when they broke up). I even toolishly quoted them in my high school graduation speech, a fact I reveal only because I rest safely in the knowledge that if you are reading this, you probably also spoke at graduation. “You can never quarantine the past,” I told 200 girls on stage that night, smug with the reference that only my friend would understand. It is also worth noting that I ended this speech with “may the force be with you” (and I wondered why getting a homecoming date was such a yearly ordeal).

When we left for college, I bought her a Pavement t-shirt, and she bought me their documentary.

For the two years following that parting, I tried and mostly failed to keep our friendship alive. She studied abroad in Ghana, started two bands, and moved into an Airstream trailer. Each time I contacted her I felt sillier; she was now into veganism and nuclear disarmament, and I was still reminiscing about shows we had been to and gushing about lead singers.

Something about nursing old obsessions always feels a bit immature, and because I associated my friend so closely with Pavement, listening to them started to feel like a stand-in for still being her friend. The last time I contacted her was the day we bought the New York tickets. I wrote her a short e-mail, asking if she’d heard the news and saying I missed her. She never responded.

One of the most ridiculous things about the yearlong wait was, of course, that it presumed a life unchanged over said period. By the time September rolled around, friends had moved to Alaska and California, relationships had ended and begun, and my tickets had misplaced themselves. The New Yorker ran an entire article about this (“‘I remember thinking, This book will remind me of Pavement,’ he said. Since then, he has searched every book he owns.”), and after reading it, I found them.

The concerts themselves were perfect. I worried briefly that they would be strange and awkward, that I had built them up in my head such that they could only disappoint. Fortunately, one of their members seemed to have done the aging for all of them, and the other four retained their youthful vigor. Jeff and I were in heaven. We were also privy to an amazing spectrum of run-ins, from my summer boss to Jeff’s friend from camp to alums of this very paper. One of these explained to us at Thursday’s show that he’d had to sell his Friday ticket because his blockmate was having an engagement party. “I guess this is growing up,” he said wistfully. “Just like blink-182 said.”

Naturally, returning to school after Pavement Week has been unspeakably dull by comparison, and now that I’ve seen “The Social Network,” it honestly feels sometimes like there is nothing else to look forward to. I am trying not to let this bother me. Pavement has been good to me, it’s true, affecting me in ways far beyond the musical. To name one, I have recently realized that their lead singer created a template for every man I  have since been physically attracted to (tall, lanky, boyish, clever). Courtney Love once called him the Grace Kelly of indie rock, and while she is difficult to take seriously on any matter—especially as of late—in this instance she was definitely onto something.

I wish sometimes that I could share such observations with my high school best friend, but maybe that’s what I am meant to understand. Pavement could not and cannot save our friendship, and while it sounds absurd to think of it in those terms now, it has taken me an embarrassingly long time to accept that fact. Like most students of the humanities, I firmly maintain that poems and movies and records can make a life, and change it, and indeed improve upon it in ways previously unimaginable. But like everything, they will at times be woefully inadequate. There may come a moment when Pavement no longer occupies such a privileged spot in my emotional memory. That moment may be sooner than I expect. But I really hope it’s not the case for a while. What would Jeff and I e-mail about?

—Jessica R. Henderson ’11 is an English concentrator in Currier House. She plans her life a year in advance.