One Friday night at summer’s end, my friends’ band was scheduled to play at Wagstock, an annual event held by some dude in his backyard in the middle of Fleetville, Pennsylvania (a.k.a., nowhere). It was the most nineties thing ever. I couldn’t stop raving about how everything was so 1995; I’m sure it was driving Venus Flytrap—whom I renamed “Mary,” and I was “Lauren,” because those names seemed far more nineties than our own—insane. We were all in this guy’s backyard, and there was a bonfire. Venus Flytrap had her sweatshirt tied around her waist, and people were driving Jeeps around the property, and of course someone’s always got to bring a dog to one of these things. I leaned against a tree like I was taking a high school yearbook photo and drank gin from a flask. Conversely, like a true rock star, Sir had done a shot of Pepto Bismol in the Sheetz parking lot beforehand, declaring, “This is how we all end up.”
But back to the nineties. Even the band’s set list was super nineties. I sang two songs (from the nineties!) with them on stage, and I think I did okay, even though my mic kept cutting out during “Zombie,” and I was self-conscious about not being loud enough when singing “I’m Only Happy When It Rains.” The guy manning the PA system told me to project more, but I just can’t sing as loud as Sir, who has the lungs of a lumberjack, bellowing through the bluffs. But some boys standing off to the side were like, “I like your voice!” so that was fun, and when I hopped off stage, the PA system guy was like, “That’s it?!” I stand like Wonder Woman when I sing.
The band finished playing, and they even got called for an encore, and I was proud of them. I enjoyed how people would sing along to the “whoa-oh whoa-oh whoas” during “The Sweater Song.” I think the band even got mooned by someone being ZANY.
We stayed to listen to the next band, which was just terrible. The douchey front man was what really ruined it for me. The second he was on stage, he announced he was on mushrooms, and he kept prefacing every song with “we wrote this, we wrote this.” At one point, he was like, “We wrote this, it’s about sex,” and he started singing about being deep inside some chick, and I was just like, “YOU REPULSE ME!” He was sincerely sickening me out. I kept taking a poll among my friends: “Do you like this? Is this any good? I don’t understand.” I found the music corny and unimaginative, although Scout enjoyed their song “Big Buddha/Little Buddha.” I recall one song having the lyrics, “I’m Mike / I live in the country, uh / Every day it smells like cow shit.” When we were leaving, the terrible band was playing Led Zeppelin’s “Bring It On Home,” and the front man (now without his shirt) was like, “I can’t believe we even know how to play this!” I made a motion to declare the guy an arrogant tool, and it was seconded, so that means it must go down in the books.
Scout drove us home, and it was the first time, I believe, I’ve been in a car with him behind the wheel. I don’t think he’s ever been funnier than when he’s driving (Scout: “Wait, I’m being funny? All right, thanks, I guess.”). Everything he was saying was amusing me. He said his favorite song of all time was when this one band he saw in a bar just played music and screamed out random numbers, until they reached the chorus, which was just, “Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!”
Venus Flytrap helped me retrieve my seat belt so I could ride home safely, and she showed me a video where some Disney show was talking about Mickey and Goofy searching for “the triangle bush” with its magical button that when pressed, fireworks go off. That had to have been on purpose. The drums were sliding from side to side in the back of the trunk, and it sounded like the whole world was falling down back there. I asked of the sight up ahead, “Is that a deer? Oh, never mind, it’s a mailbox,” and Sir declared Is That a Deer or a Mailbox? the worst game ever. If it wasn’t obvious before now, sobriety had decided to elude me for the evening.
We arrived at Sir and Pickle’s house, where Sir yelled at me to shut the back door before their dog got out. But I was too distracted, blowing on a spider, that the dog escaped and Sir just stared at me in bewilderment. Scout said how he used to play baseball in high school but messed up his knee so he can’t play anymore, and that made me sad, the idea of being physically prevented from doing something one really loves. We played You Don’t Know Jack and I was horrible at it. Sir put on the recording of the night’s show, and I ran upstairs and helped make the guest bed with Pickle because I knew that my performance was going to go wrong with all the mic-cutting-outness and didn’t want to sit through it. Scout followed me and accused me of hiding, and then I helped make the bed all weird by putting sheets on while also being on the mattress.
I spent the rest of night, slumbering in the guest room. In the morning, Sir was bustling about, Swiffering the floor at the crack of dawn, and reminding me to collect my contacts. I returned to The Penthouse and crawled into my own bed, and sleep sloughed off the rest of the lingering summer.
Crave more summer? Check out part 2 of the Last Night of Summer summer series!
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