One of the great things about being a teenager is that it's your duty to spend your money as absurdly as possible. With no rent, food, or utilities to pay for, it's the one time of your life when spending your entire net worth on Andre the Giant memorabilia can be construed as a good idea. When I was 17, I wasn't just aware of that fact, I embraced it. In fact, I embraced it to the point of joining a cheese club with my friend at the local Kroger's. Maybe it wasn't a club, in that we didn't have meetings or officers or monogrammed jackets, but we did have membership cards that entitled to a special selection of fromage each week. Oh, how I long for the days when my only financial responsibility was my cheese club dues.
In addition to joining that organization, I also made an unspoken oath to the Gods of Rock to buy, at least once a week, a CD I'd never heard of. I'd go up to Whorehouse Music and browse the stacks until I found something that tickled my fancy. Usually, these decisions were based on either reading something good about the artist in question, or seeing a naked lady on the cover of a CD. I don't remember which of those reasons was the impetus for me buying "Doolittle" by the Pixies, but I'll just guess and say a bit of both.
Now, whenever I bought one of those CDs, I had a little routine I had to perform. First step: make the purchase without crying in front of the cashier (daunting enough). Second step: sit on the bumper of my car and read the liner notes. Third step: drive back home while listening to the new CD. I must've done that several dozen times from the ages of 16-18, but the only instance of it that sticks out in my mind was immediately after buying Doolittle.
The purchase was made, the liner notes were read, and I was zooming towards my house, trying to digest what I was hearing. I was flipping through the tracks, and I came to one that interested me immediately: Crackity Jones. Like many of my favorites at the time, it was loud, fast, and partly in Spanish. As Frank Black wailed through the chorus and I banged along in agreement with the whiteboy head nod, I glanced across the highway, towards the oncoming traffic. There, I saw a car that looked exactly like my grandmother's, zooming between lanes and hauling ass across the median, followed by several police cars.
Worried that what I was actually hearing was some sort of voodoo incantation, I paused the song and pulled over the side of the road. I took a deep breath and looked back, only to see the presumed escapee pull a 180 and drive down the side of the highway. The police followed quickly, but I just sat there and hyperventilated over what this could do to my grandmother's insurance rates. When I got home, I verified that all was well with the family, then shut myself in my room and promptly proceeded to freak out.
In the years since I turned 16, I've spent a lot of time driving vehicles. Cars, trucks, stagecoaches, submarines, space shuttles: they're all pretty much the same when I'm behind the wheel. However, over all of the hours since that I've operated a vehicle, I have never, ever seen anything like the scene I witnessed coming home from the music store on that day. That's a good thing; I don't know if I could handle it.
In fact, I'm so sure I couldn't handle it, that I've sinced burned myself a copy of Doolittle that's missing Crackity Jones (one of my all-time favorite songs), specifically so I can listen to it while driving without fear of another incident. I don't know how much sense it is to blame the Pixies for the whole thing, but I have. Not only will I not listen to to Crackity Jones ever again in my car, but I've made it my own mission to see that the same applies for my grandmother. Letters have been written to the Pixies and their manager, begging them never to play Abilene. Hungers strikes were staged until the Wal Mart in her town agreed never to stock Doolittle, or any other release starting with a D. And just for good sure, I ripped out the CD player in her car and replaced it with a phonograph. If the roadways of Texas are still unsafe, it's not because I didn't try.
Posted by Cody at September 14, 2004 6:29 PM