Forget Cool

CRASH

by Stephanie Austin

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I met Ben in a night class. Humor Writing 101. I needed a final elective, and I thought humor writing was about essays but instead it was about crafting late night jokes. I was in my chaos phase, so I cut off all my hair and showed up to our second class a new person. My family was mortified, and my friends had mixed reactions, but not Ben. Ben said he liked girls with short hair. 

We had our first date in early summer. We smoked cigarettes and drank screwdrivers and beer at dinner and then went across the street and continued our date around a pool table. My father taught me to shoot pool in his favorite bars. He couldn’t relate to me in the daylight, but he loved darkness and alcohol. I’m not great at it, but I can sustain a game.  

I put money in the jukebox. I picked a Beatles song. And then I picked a Dave Matthews song. It was off Crash but it wasn’t “Crash Into Me.” Did we know about Dave’s assertion the song was about a peeping tom back then? Perhaps we did. Likely, I picked “So Much to Say” because the bop at the end open up my head and let me out little bab-bay is a goddamn jam though I don’t recall the bar erupting into song. The only other people in there, older men, weren’t clamoring for some Dave Matthews to cap out their night. But Ben was like, my god, I love Dave Matthews, and then I said, I pegged you for a Dave Matthews fan, and he took me by my hands and looked into my eyes and he was like why? 

Didn’t most of us who went to high school in the 90s like Dave Matthews? When Under the Table and Dreaming came out, I was at a party and another drunk girl made me sit in front of a speaker while she played “Satellite” on CD so I could feel the pulse of his voice. She closed her eyes, put her hand over heart, and wept until the song finished. Later on that night, a group of guys took her CD out of the CD player and threw it in the pool. 

Ben told me he once dated a girl he took to a B&B and on the way home, while she was asleep in the passenger seat, the song “Crash Into Me” came on. He realized he didn’t feel anything for her. We decided to play another game. I racked. He broke. 

Ben paid for our drinks. He told me he liked a story I’d written. This was the closest I’d ever been to having a man tell me he loved me, and thus I understood I had to make sure Ben heard “Crash Into Me” again but this time when he was with me. 

We partied all summer. I lined my eyes in dark brown, traced them until the dark brown looked black because I never felt brave enough to wear pure black eyeliner. Ben told me about his roommates. His best friend, who was a girl, and her boyfriend. You can’t meet them, he said. She made him promise he wasn’t going to date anyone because she thought he needed time to figure himself out before he moved at the end of the summer. When he was with me, he was breaking a promise to her. Cool, but “Crash Into Me” was going to arrive organically and save us. The rule I made for myself was that I could not play the song on purpose. I could not, for example, play it into his answering machine, or get into his car with the CD and say, mind if I listen to some Dave? The song had to come on the radio when we were together. It had to play in some doorway as we passed by. 

One night toward the end of the summer, we ran into some of his co-workers. Everyone was out for the booze and the cigarettes, and I was also out for the booze and the cigarettes but perhaps the huge party bar we went to where you could dance on the actual bar like in Coyote Ugly, might choose “Crash Into Me” as their close out song. They only ever played “Closing Time” at last call but maybe the DJ was also trying to use the cosmic powers of the universe and Dave Matthews to make someone fall in love with him. We never had the chance to find out.   

The co-workers wanted to go to a strip club, and I wanted to be a girl who was cool with going to a strip club. We watched the girls dance. Unfortunately, no one writhed around the pole to “Crash Into Me.” The club was smoky and loud. Ben yelled into my ear he was worried about the girls, and what their childhoods had been like, and then he paid for one of his friends to get a lap dance.  

Ben and I left the club and went to an after party at someone’s house. I threw up in a stranger’s bathroom. I found a tube of toothpaste in the drawer and put some on my finger and rubbed it around my mouth. When I told Ben I puked, he drove me home and said if we were different people under different circumstances living different lives in a different time, we might have a chance. He’d try to call again before he moved though he was busy. 

The phone never rang. I went into free fall. Ben shattered me, and then he was gone. I was living in an apartment I couldn’t afford. I’d graduated college and needed a job. Unable to sleep most nights, I sat on my second floor patio and smoked alone. I wanted someone to see me up there drawn in by the red tip of my cigarette. The silence was painful.

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Her favorite pizza topping is basil, her favorite idea of a date is a roof top bar with a glass of expensive wine, and her favorite vacation spot is anywhere cooler than where she lives in Phoenix.