The Coolest Guy I Barely Knew

In the summer of 1997, I decided I wasn't going to go home any more and that I'd just tough it out near campus for a few months until school started again in the fall. With a little luck, I'd managed to get a job working with a few summer camps as an extra set of hands that paid enough for me to keep basic groceries stocked and leave a little cash each week for beer and haircuts.

It was everything I'd hoped it would be and more.

There are a few oddball summer songs that tie me to that summer - 311's Homebrew being one of them, more on that in a second - but one album stands above all the others as the mile marker of that time. Poi Dog Pondering's Pomegranate is the one that always brings me back (honorable mention to Buffalo Tom's Big Red Letter Day which is a very close second).

The first few weeks of the summer was spent "looking for work" which meant sleeping until 10 a.m., lazily making my way to the St. Norbert campus center to check the board and make use of the summer meal plan at the cafeteria to get at least one decent meal a day. I'd watch students drop in for lunch after morning summer school classes and rush back out for afternoon courses or to hit the library before I wandered back into the sunlight to head home, nap, work out and occasionally call one of my parents to explain that the good jobs were taken by upperclassmen.

Musically, I got lucky when one of the students working in the mail room caught me at lunch in early June. "Hey man, there are some things for the radio station that we have, but there's no one there in the summer. You and your roommate work there, right? Can you stop by and pick that stuff up?"

I went home with a box of promo CDs and posters that kept me busy for a week. I'd continue to collect CDs all summer, dutifully listening to them and keeping them clear of my collection so I could pass them along in the fall. The posters were kept to offset my labor costs of hauling the boxes across campus all summer.

Classes ended in late May and there were three of us in a college-owned house a few blocks from campus. We each had our own space. I had the single room upstairs. Roberto had the double room to himself because no one cared and he was older than us. Matt P had the single on the ground floor. In late June Brian moved in.

We knew that there was a chance there'd be a fourth added by Residence Life, but it was up in the air for a while and we hoped we'd dodged a bullet (or that they'd forgotten). I don't remember exactly what the first day was really like but I remember the presence of Brian settling in on the house.

Brian had left school the year before needing to finish one class to graduate. He was like a lot of the guys I knew from growing up in the suburbs of Chicago - Irish, a big personality and abrasive for effect - probably because he was exactly that guy, but from a different suburb.

His attendance in summer school felt a little like the plot to Billy Madison and a little like a complicated prison-release program. He told us that with a job lined up post-graduation, he'd worked it out with the school to come back within 18 months to finish the last course and cash out his degree. This was his time and while he was "in school" he was definitely not a student.

Here was a guy who was 22 or 23, had a fiancee, a good paying job in Chicago (something business-y), an apartment in the city and a new life that was interrupted for a few weeks of slumming it in a firetrap of a house with us. It was a reality show in the days before any of that even existed.

Naturally, I thought he was the coolest guy imaginable.

Mixed in with the CDs he'd packed was Pomegranate. I listened as he put it on one evening and then he proceeded to tell me how cool this band was and that I should totally see them live when I was home in Chicago. "Totally," I said. I was 19. I had no fake ID and zero chance of smooth talking a doorman into letting me in. Brian didn't seem to notice or care.

That album isn't one that is on heavy rotation any more for me. The album is a little thick to push through at times and has a few tracks I'm not all that into now. I think a big part of the aversion is listening to it retroactively and remembering just how much I sunk into the lyrics at the time. I'm still up in the air on whether it's because it's akin to seeing your hero fall or discovering poetry you wrote in freshman English class.

Still, when a song like Catacombs manages to push to the top of a random shuffle, I listen to it with detached fondness. Like driving past your old high school, it's that feeling of "home" but still a place that isn't worth revisiting.

I listened to the live album when the anniversary of Pomegranate came out to see if I could place myself in a venue (had I been cool enough to even know where to find a fake ID at 20) and enjoyed it for what it was. For the record, I couldn't really see a way for me to have been "there" - I would have been out of place from the start. If there's one thing I've learned about this album is that it doesn't hold up for me when I strip away the physical history around it. I'm reluctant to recommend it to many people, unless I have a specific reason to do so. None of that makes it any less valuable to me, though. It's always an odd surprise to hear these songs - none of which I everseek out, but are more or less welcome when they appear out of nowhere.