[or; The Rentals at Metro, Chicago]
August 14th, 2007
In summer of 2007 my friend Angus got us tickets to see The Rentals at the Metro. An acquisition of concert tickets in the antiquated past. He could have purchased them on the internet, but Angus didn’t have the internet.
Honestly, for both of us, it was still a time where we’d travel to a physical Ticketmaster location, usually in the back of JC Penny or Carsons department store, to have them print out paper tickets and place them in a tiny envelope. A physical presence stamped on an experience. I liked the nostalgia of holding on to the ritual, and I’d still do it if it were in any way possible or practical.
The night of the concert, the simple plan was for Angus to drive up and meet me out in front of the venue and we’d go in together to see the show. With Angus, however, the simplest of plans would perpetually spin out into a backwards swerve of brass knuckles and DUIs. A Napier stepped jigger of fits of rage and jail time.
A cocktail of cherry syrup, hypochondria, and delusion with a twist of paranoia and some lime zest.
When you get to know people well, you start to see a curated spirit list of patterns. Various levels of viscous temperament in an array of colors in bottles behind the bar. Whether the person will arrive on time or if they will be late stops being a question. I would assign correction factors to various friends and that way I could mentally adjust for the window of time in which I’d be waiting at a coffee shop like a doofus, alone.
I did this because I was always on time. Like, to an annoying fault, admittedly. To not specifically feel like certain friends were wasting my time, I’d figure in a correction to the singularity. That way I could either show up later myself or at least psychologically understand that I would need to consider bringing along a pocket-sized paperback.
I had long since assigned Angus a correction factor of forty-five minutes to infinity. All this meant was that the earliest he would show up would be forty-five minutes late, he’d usually miss out on the main portion of fun, and sometimes he would mysteriously not show up at all.
I had to accept this, or due to my mental capacity we would simply not be able to hang out ever. The good news is, by this math of adjustment, in theory, a person could never truly be late.
…
This guy, when he came to the city, would absolutely refuse to park anywhere else, other than in that small strip of road just west of Lincoln Park Zoo where parking was free. He was just familiar with it based on his one or two years of living in Chicago in the past.
Even if we were hanging out in Wicker Park or somewhere else really far from Lincoln Park, he’d leave his car near the zoo and take a twenty-dollar cab ride, forty minutes across the city.
This is of course opposed to just parking at a meter and walking maybe a block to wherever we were going to be hanging out. It always felt kind of dark but I couldn’t quite put my finger on “why”. A high gravity mixture of fear and attachment with a buoyancy that my feeble logic could never displace.
…
I waited outside of the Metro for Angus who held my concert ticket. As everyone else filed into the show to see The Rentals I stood there like an idiot searching for any sign of Angus lazily lollygagging up the avenue. That aimless idle I’d come to feel pretty content I’d never have to witness again.
The “door” time came and went. The show’s start time for the opening band came and went. Then the second band started. Was Angus late? Well, based on my time correction theory, by default he wasn’t late. He was just Angus – a constant tincture of laziness, oblivion and…whatever the opposite of lucky is.
Was he there with my paper ticket by show time? Absolutely not. I began to realize the breakdown in my correction factor. The only design flaw was the uselessness in terms of getting into a concert that I was actually paying for. Any thought that I had to ultimately rely on this guy was a mismanagement on my part.
…
Angus was roughly the last person in their twenties to obtain current technology in every regard. He stubbornly didn’t have a computer, let alone the internet as noted above. He didn’t have cable at his apartment at the time and streaming was not really a thing yet. Obviously, he didn’t subscribe to a newspaper.
There was no input or output of any data other than his DVD player. Living life in a closed circuit, he was literally thee guy who didn’t know 9/11 happened until roughly 9/13 or so.
He kept his TV on, showing the DVD screensaver that would bounce all over the monitor like a non-interactive game of Pong that he’d just sit here and watch for hours while smoking Marlboros and one-hitters. Analyzing the color shift in the logo as it could slowly ricochet, and predicting when it would bounce perfectly off the corner, it became a hypnotic escape as he slowly drifted in to comatose.
Texting existed. But I honestly don’t even think Angus had a cell phone at that point in life. All of our previous virtual conversations took place on his mom’s landline. One half of the issue was that he had no way to tell anyone if he got arrested for fighting with his girlfriend in public, all the while wearing a belly shirt since she ripped off the bottom half of his Hot Topic tee during the tussle.
The other part of the issue was that there was always an issue – and it was constantly and perpetually, at least one level deeper than you would ever fully know or think.
“Oh, the cops caught you smoking a joint in your girlfriend’s front yard? That sucks, man!”
“Oh wait…that’s not the end of the story? You ran from the cops, and they tackled you?!”
I sat on that one for a week before I learned the full depth:
“Wait…what?! When the policeman tackled you, your face hit the ground and all of your front teeth got busted out in the god damn lawn?!”
Then, of course the following twin sagas of not only dealing with another arrest record but also getting all new replacement veneers. A one two punch of spice and tannins with Frenet-Branca as a nuanced supporting player.
…
As the concert played on without us, the spike of emotional bitters and a spiritual shot of Malört set in to me as I began to think of how I tried so hard with this dude. I got him a job with me once.
I wasn’t truly sure he could handle the responsibilities, but I also put a higher priority on taking that gamble than avoidance of risk in tarnishing my name. He never intended to stop smoking weed, so in order to pass drug tests sanctioned by the trade union, he fashioned a makeshift bladder with a tube and small cork.
The idea was to fill it with clean urine, jock it and sneak it into the bathroom to secretly fill the sample cup with the alternate pee.
I’d leave a plastic bottle of my urine in random places and we’d chrip over the Nextel about where the drop was located the morning of. He’d carry that golden flask around with him for days in his vehicle until the sample was more than likely too rancid to effectively use.
I did this for him because I had a complex and I felt like since I got him the job, he was my responsibility. I didn’t have kids at the time so why not raise and foster some manchild just as carefully as he maintained his habit of illegal substances?
This was all before Angus at his local headshop, discovered The Whizzinator – the exact device he was trying to reverse engineer. It actually existed. The Whizzinator came with packets of synthetic urine powder that you would mix with water. No more having to borrow a friend’s bodily waste fluid!
The caveat with The Whizzinator was that it contained a small metal coil to heat up the synthetic urine to body temperature, because (just in case you don’t come from the same world that we do), some drug tests seek out a minimum temperature in order to stave off people from collecting random Figi bottles of piss stashed beneath some little league bleachers.
When entering the union hall for the urinalysis, after all that trouble, Angus freaked out and left The Whizzinator in his car. The hall had a walk-through metal detector, and he was terrified the alarm would be triggered by detecting the copper wire piece in the device.
When union personnel told everyone to line up for the drug test, Angus just stood up and walked right out the door.
Done. End of story. It was so incredibly obvious, they had him come back another day and they tested his hair for THC. I’d never even heard of that before. Always one level deeper. He didn’t want to do a “rehab” program for weed so he just gave up and quit.
…
I stood there developing my resolution of the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to see The Rentals that night. I knew Angus was performing one of his mystical no-shows – and a no-show for him meant no show for me. Right before I gave up to saunter off to G Man Tap, ironically, I saw the actual band members of The Rentals file out of their tour bus that was parked out front on Clark Street. I was stunned.
I had about three seconds to decide.
I acted.
I stopped Petra Hayden on the sidewalk as she was walking into the Metro.
I quickly explained that I was a fan, that I bought a ticket for their show, and that my friend was probably not showing up with my ticket. I told her that I saw their set at Double Door.
The only thing was that when I told her I’d seen them play at Double Door, the set I was referring to was just a year or two beforehand. For some reason she assumed I meant that I saw them at Double Door in the mid-90s.
She was so thrilled by this false information that I had no motivation to correct her. I realized at that point, the misunderstanding combined with her excitement was my new potential, current ticket in terms of getting inside the Metro.
She walked back over and got Matt Sharp who was still climbing out of the bus, and she told him I was at the “original Double Door show” in 1995. They were both so giddy with the idea that I was some sort of old school Friend of P, they got me inside. I did not mention to Matt Sharp that I didn’t even like their second album.
They told the box office people that I was with the band. We walked right past security as they held the velvet rope open for me, no questions asked. It was a good feeling to know I was not someone who had to rely on a guy who consistently dropped the ball. Like Billy Zhane in Titanic; I make my own luck.
In my head I thought they would lead me to the VIP area backstage to pop champagne and consume caviar. But they didn’t. All that really happened was The Rentals got me through the door and then they vanished, reappearing on stage.
…
My situations with Angus became so cyclical and predictable it was obvious there were issues that were well beyond anything I was prepared to handle. It became noticeably worse as the years trekked by. His persecution complex became exhausting.
He thrived on chaos, and he needed someone to feud with at any and all times. Sometimes I’d get caught up in the formula, mainly because he’d jab at me in such offensive, unfair ways, in the moment, due to the sheer lunacy of what he was proposing I just couldn’t not respond.
And so spiraled the maze of argumentation. There was something in me (while in my mid to late twenties) where I felt some sort of principle in attempting to correct a twisted narrative. I don’t have that anymore.
The truth was that he couldn’t seem to function unless there was drama. An Apollinaris glass of pettiness and tension in his hand, and a cigarette dangling from his lip.
The cocktail definitely included a dram of narcissism as a fortified aperitif. A splash of orange liqueur and a single malt shot of self-absorption, stirred together with barspoon of vanity.
I put our friendship on hold in October 2012 because when I was going through a separation with my then-wife, heading toward a divorce, his main point and contribution as my friend was: “I told you so”.
I didn’t need or deserve that, and during that era of my life I just had no option but to cut contact with the noxious matter he oozed into my being. I took a four-year Angus break. I reached back out in 2016 and we started to chat and spend time together again for, I’d say roughly one year.
Being a singleton in the city I felt I had the capacity to take on the connection again. But the toxicity had aged like an ale fermenting in the sun. A vile of blood of the undead, percolating in past friction now flowing intravenously. The friendship sputtered into ravenous zombie folklore, and I realized my tolerability index had likely peaked well before.
Sadly, I realized I didn’t have volume for the blended drink of resentment and obsession.
Due to the antics, I cut contact again in 2017, but this time permanently.
…
I can’t seem to remember anything about The Rentals show that night. An evening repast. Other than being elated by the surreal notion that the band members themselves let me into the building, I just have a passing, languishing feeling about it. I found the serigraph printing for free at Reckless Records and it’s been framed, on my wall for seventeen years now.
With normal friends, The Rentals story was a fun anecdote to share. But Angus was the was the kind of guy who if I told him the actual Rentals got me into the Metro without a ticket, it wouldn’t register. It would be too overstimulating.
I also knew it would garner some sort of odd jealousy. This was my relationship with Angus – an acidic potion of Absinthe in wormwood. He was never prepared for information that landed good fortune over me, so playing his game, I knew what I could and couldn’t share.
…
As far as Angus himself, today? I hope he is well. Though it is sad, I still feel a rush of clean and refreshing sea breeze whenever I think about the burden I no longer have to bear and was never truly responsible for in the first place.
We’ll always have the first Rentals album. There will always be other musical endeavors like M83, Smashing Pumpkins and Metric that we obsessed over. On some mythic plane of continuation, I feel we’ll always existentially be connected on new releases from artists and directors we loved.
B-movie horror and genre film. Thoughts on specific scenes from the latest Quentin Tarantino movie. The portions and notes I miss come in terms of the buzz. The sweet vermouth and the green chartreuse. The laughs.
But I now know overall, a beverage is only ever as tasty as the vessel it’s consumed from.
…
Cocktail Photos by @zookeeper1980
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