Dave Matthews and the Drake Relays

“Nope,” I said emphatically, “not happening. I can’t stand the Dave Matthews Band and we are not playing that in my car.” I’m not even sure I said I was sorry.

I was recently divorced or not yet divorced, I can’t precisely remember where I was in that chronology of my personal history. It was a marriage that has diminished in significance as time wore on. In fact, from where I am now, almost thirty years later, I’m not sure it carries any significance whatsoever. She was a high school friend. We started dating after graduation. We had no kids. 

So it’s Drake Relays time — which is when? I can’t remember for sure. March? — and my friend Joe and his wife, Laura, are going back because she went to Drake University and it was always a quasi reunion and definite party situation, the Relays. I think they asked me if I wanted to go because they knew I was from Iowa, but also because they needed wheels to get there, and I had just had my engine reconditioned in the VW, so it was like new. I even got a speeding ticket on that trip. In an ‘82 Vanagon. Remarkable. 

I’m not sure what was in heavy rotation for me back then but it might have included Colossal Head by Los Lobos, Richard Thompson’s Rumor and Sigh, and probably some other selections in that genre. Those two records have Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake in common. They were a great producing/engineering duo back then so I might throw in the Latin Playboys and Suzanne Vega too. There also had to be some jazz. Had I found out about Slim Cessna’s Auto Club yet? Who knows? Thirty years creates a chasm, the depths of which are hard for me to accurately mine.

Boy, Joe and Laura probably hated me. Why was I so against Dave Matthews? Would it have killed me to acquiesce to their desire to hear them? Hell, they brought their own music selections for chrissakes. 

Now that I’m writing this, it’s coming back to me that it was post-divorce because I was smoking. I didn’t start smoking until the tail end of my marriage when I knew it was on the brink. Yeah, that’s when I started smoking. At thirty. There was this girl, Jennan, who was twenty-one. She worked at the coffee shop in the strip mall where the store I worked at was located and we started to become friends. She smoked. And, it bears mentioning, was really pretty. Tiny round boobs and my favorite part of her body, a perfectly shaped butt. We tried having sex once but neither one of us had any condoms so I got dressed and raced to the store to get some, but by the time I got back I couldn’t get it up again, and, for reasons unrelated to that performative hiccup, we never tried again. Bullet dodged, in retrospect.

I remembered that I was smoking because, honestly, I’m not sure anything about the trip to Des Moines for the Relays stands out beyond the Dave Matthews Incident except for a vague memory of being on the patio at a bar near the Drake campus, day drinking, and there was this girl who was also smoking American Spirits. American Spirits were fairly new at the time and you couldn’t buy them at most places. You had to work hard to get your cigarette equivalent to health food. And so I had my eye on her, but only peripherally. We didn’t talk. Might not have even made eye contact unless it was accidental. Literally that’s the only other thing I can remember about that trip.

So I was smoking and not listening to Dave Matthews. That much is clear. I also had the hots for this girl I met at Joe and Laura’s wedding. Tracy. She was a nurse at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s hospital and was a bride’s maid to my groomsman. The night of the wedding, which was at the Hotel Boulderado in Boulder, we made out like a couple crazed nymphomaniacs without the sex part. After that weekend I think I sent her roses to her work. Isn’t that crazy? I wanted to be single so badly but if a girl showed the tiniest hint of interest in me I latched on with bear claws because I had a lousy self-image which led to my being certain that no other girl on the planet would have the good sense to even feign interest in me.

Tracy and I would go on several dates throughout that summer and occasionally make out like crazy but never had sex. She was getting over a long relationship with a guy named Larkin that she hinted was abusive. She never opened up about it, which I thought was weird because she didn’t strike me as a terribly private person. I’ve always wondered if it was physically abusive.  

I remember his name well, Larkin’s, because Barry Larkin was a shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds at the time and one of the better players in the league. What a dumb first name though, I thought. I never really pushed her on the sex thing or to open up about her prior relationship. It didn’t seem like my place.

Probably my favorite road trip to Iowa took place the summer before when me and my best high school buddy, John, drove to my hometown, Jefferson, IA, in that same VW, for my best childhood friend, Chris’s, wedding. And then John and I went on to St. Louis to see his college roommate, and then up to Chicago to see my brother. Finally, we made our way back to Jefferson to crash what would have been my ten-year high school reunion had I not moved to Denver when I was a sophomore. I’m pretty sure many of my former classmates thought I was gay and John was my boyfriend. Had I not moved to Denver when I was a sophomore I would not have met John when I was a junior or any of my other friends in that friend group, and I wouldn’t have engaged in the aforementioned marriage of insignificance. Or be on this road trip I’m telling you about.

Making serious life decisions is like deciding what to have when looking at the menu of a diner. You hope it’s going to be good, but it’s a diner so it’s probably not going to be no matter what you choose. It’s only after you’ve eaten that you realize it was the wrong choice, but that’s also when you realize there might not have been a right choice, save for not going to that diner in the first place.

We did some cool things on that road trip. I met Buddy Guy and got his autograph. Saw a game at Busch Stadium after which we went to a strip club in East St. Louis where I watched two girls in a glass shower do things I never really considered two girls in a glass shower — or not in a glass shower — to even want to do. Went to Blueberry Hill and a record store, the name of which I simply can not remember, but its storefront sign featured a dude playing two (or was it three?) saxophones at the same time, which John informed me was Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who I had never heard of. I had my mind blown at a gem of a tiny music store in Chicago when I heard Son House for the first time.

Anyway, that was really a great trip. But I always felt bad about not letting Joe and Laura listen to Dave Matthews. If I hadn’t completely lost touch with them I would reach out and apologize. Maybe one day they’ll see this story.