I’ve always loved scalding showers, the kind that brand my skin with screaming red splotches, the ones where the pelting is just a half a notch below painful. And in eighth grade — when I was a skinny suburban Catholic school girl rockin’ globs of sparkly liquid eyeshadow and blue eyeliner most days — I paired fiery jams with my inferno showers like I paired two percent milk with the Chips Ahoy! cookies I gobbled after school while toggling between Full House and Gilmore Girls reruns.
“Let’s get fucked up and die!” I belted one Sunday afternoon in spring, rinsing the Herbal Essences shampoo out of my hair and moving on to slathering floral-scented body wash onto my arms and legs with my exfoliating bath sponge. “I’m speaking fig-ur-a-tively, of course, like the last time that I committed suicide — social suicide!”
This was one of my very favorites of the endless alternative boy band songs my best friend Chloe and I spent that year and the first half of high school obsessed with. While I never Sharpie-graffitied my bedroom wall with profanity-filled lyrics — blatant destruction like that never would have flitted through my mind — we religiously prowled The Exchange, the used CD store in a strip mall near my house, for copies of albums like Boys Like Girls, the eponymous 2006 debut album of the Boston-born pop punk emo group Boys Like Girls. I blasted their hit The Great Escape (“Throw it away/Forget yesterday/We'll make the great escape/We won't hear a word they say/They don't know us anyway/Watch it burn/Let it die”) every chance I got and got so excited about the cool album cover art, which resembled dripping stacked lines of aqua, lime green and blood red paint, that I showed it to my dad.
“Boys like girls,” he read out loud from the driver’s seat of his Chevy Impala as we sat together in the lot at Evergreen Park, waiting for my little brother to wrap up an activity like a baseball practice or a friend’s birthday party in the pavilion. “Are these boys who are attracted to girls or boys who are similar to girls?”
The ultimate spreadsheet nerd obsessed with 401(k)s who refused to sing in the car in front of me out of either a self-consciousness or a self-restraint I couldn’t understand, my dad didn’t get it. And he didn’t get it any better when I uploaded the CDs to my iTunes account on the family desktop and then used a special cord to sync them to my white iPod classic with the control wheel in the middle. iTunes was awesome because its online store allowed Chloe and me to stream 30-second clips of Panic! At the Disco (my all-time favorite) and Fall Out Boy (hers) songs we wanted to buy through our own tinny computer speakers. This was easier than getting our moms to drop us off at the mall, where in the very back of Barnes & Noble we could sample bands and artists — All Time Low, The Academy Is…, The Rocket Summer — by scanning their CDs at vestibules and cranking the moody vocals and thrashing instrumentals through giant headphones that never fit snugly and always slipped down to my cheeks.
Best of all, my iPod made my music maximally portable. I could, you know, stick it into its donut-shaped speaker and stick that on the bathroom counter while I let water that was basically boiling pour down on me. “Yeah, so I’m already dead,” I sang along to the song, a Motion City Soundtrack classic diabolically titled L.G. FUAD instead of just Let’s Get Fucked Up and Die, probably to throw off nice, attentive parents like mine. “On the inside, but I can still pretend.”
For me, it was all about the music. I could hardly tell you the names of any of the guys in the bands I loved and I definitely didn’t tape their pictures, torn from J-14 or Tiger Beat magazines, to my ceiling to gaze at from bed. They probably weren’t even in any teen magazines. Freshman year of high school, my mom dropped Chloe and me and a couple other friends off at Diesel, a club on Pittsburgh’s East Carson Street — a stretch of bars and restaurants where 22-year-olds flock to get fucked up (but usually not to die) — for my first concert ever. The band, Cute Is What We Aim For, sounded terrible, but I screamed along anyhow: “Medically speaking you're adorable/And from what I hear you're quite affordable/But I like them pricey.” Chloe would become a bit of a crowdsurfing aficionado at those kinds of claustrophobic, cigarette-smoke-filled, fire hazard shows once we hit high school. She called the first time she popcorned over the undulating glut of teenagers, supported only by strangers’ hands, the climax of her life, but I hated the aggressive shoving in the mosh, the elbows. It made me feel trapped and vulnerable like in the stampede scene of The Lion King when Scar lets Mufasa fall to his death, trampled in the gorge by the horde of panicking antelope. I’d grasp Chloe’s hand as tight as I could just to stay standing.
When the lights went up at the end of that first show, we were so parched from screaming that we each forked over $5 for a bottle of water at the bar. We couldn’t go somewhere else where we wouldn’t get gouged, because my mom had made us promise, made us vow, that we wouldn’t leave the venue until she returned for us in her silver minivan, unless it caught fire. Not even to wait on the sidewalk right outside.
“If there is a fire you can leave but don’t talk to anyone and stay together,” she’d said when she dropped us off. She twisted around in the front seat and stared us down as we landed on the sidewalk in this unfamiliar, adult place, free, and rolled the van door shut with a thud. “And call me!”
She pulled away only once we were inside, using hands branded with bright red under-21 stamps to shield our ears from the raucous, piercing fluctuation of decibels as sound guys set up speakers and amps and microphones on the stage. It was smaller and lower to the floor than I’d imagined, more accessible.
Minutes after hopping out of the shower and relocating my donut speaker to my bedroom, dressed in Soffe shorts rolled at least twice and with my brown hair soaking my T-shirt at the shoulders, I trotted down the stairs. My dad waited for me in the living room. He just stood there. Looking mad. “Come here,” he said. Instead of making my own great escape like I knew I should, I went. He grabbed my shoulder, squeezed hard, and thrust his face about three inches from mine. “Let’s get fucked up and die?” he said, disgusted. I watch his lips form the words – close up – and wanted to laugh, but knew better. My eyes widened and I clamped my mouth shut. “Get rid of it,” he demanded, meaning I better delete that profane garbage from my iTunes library.
I nodded, but never did.
Andrea Frazier is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh. Although she's done lots of journalism and other kinds of writing, Let's Get Fucked Up and Die! is her first piece published in a literary magazine.
