by Suzanne Kamata
As I write this Hootie & the Blowfish have already sold more than 13 million copies of their major-label debut CD "Cracked Rear View." They've been named best new band of the year by MTV and US magazine, become best friends with David Letterman, met the President ofthe United States of America, and I hear that back home in South Carolina there's talk of naming a street after them.
Hootie & the Blowfish are not yet famous here in Japan where I
live now, nor were they celebrities when I was a senior at the University of South Carolina in 1987.
At that time I was renting a roach-infested apartment on Devine Street, a place with a tricky address so that I often got discounts on pizza deliveries. I'd spent a semester during my junior year in Avignonin the south of France and I was still dreaming about that left-behind Greek boy who kissed me for the first time on the train to Bordeaux. Sometimes, at night, I smoked Marlboros in darkened rooms while listening to jazz records - Billie Holiday, Thelonius Monk. My roommate,an ethereal young woman named Heather whose eyes were two different colors and who wore thrift shop clothes was usually off dealing with hersuicidal mother. (Just after she'd moved in with me, her professor father had taken up with one of his students. Heather's mom wasn't too happy about this.) Sometimes Heather came by to tell me about her underground adventures hanging out with prostitutes at the Chat 'N' Restmotel or with her damaged genius junkie boyfriend. His name was Montie and he played saxophone in a local avant garde band. I'd only seen him once by daylight. His skin was the pale shade of vampire flesh. Once, Heather and I shared a joint she'd found in her mother's car's glove box, but for the most part, I was alone.
I was studying French and literature. I devoured the works of Julio Cortazar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ellen Gilchrist along with the assigned Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Rimbaud. Like many young literary women, I cultivated melancholy and there were always strands of Plath poems running through my head. I was out of place on that campus - a G.D.I. in a nation of Greeks. I'd actually rushed sororities, but I wasblack-balled by a high school enemy, and instead of attending the inauguration of the one sorority that was willing to accept me, I went to the park in front of the state capitol building and fed the squirrels. While others were going to football games, and working on their tans in the last warm days of September, I was slaving at a newspaper, trying toscrape together enough cash for a trip to Marseille. When I wasn't working or studying, I wrote short stories and drank black coffee.
Most of the students I knew studied at the library. There, cramming became a social event with frequent flirtations and communal coffee breaks. I preferred to crack the books at home, in silence, without the distraction of frat boys and fellow students. And so I spread my papersout on the white cast iron table that my roommate had ripped off from a dormitory patio and wrote my essays on Sister Carrie and Balzac.
Thus, I was studying when I first heard the jangle of guitars coming from the house next door. Because I fancied myself a misanthrope and because the perpetual party atmosphere in that conservative college town was no match for my general mood, I briefly considered calling the cops. How could I get into Fleurs de Mals with that happy music infiltrating my brain?
I was quite sure that the band practicing next door was nothing like the black-clad neo-nihilistic bands that played at the G.R.O.W. cafe between poetry readings. These boys, as I would soon discover, were wholesome American guys who frowned upon drugs and smoking and took care not to use vulgar language in front of girls. They had no interest in literature, let alone poetry.
But underneath my haughty pose, I harbored a wistfulness. I'd never met the two sun-bleached blonds who lived next door, though I'd watched them from my window. California surfers, I thought. I was wrong, but that's what they looked like. In any case, they were gorgeous.
One afternoon - it must have been a week-end because there was already a keg of beer on the neighboring lawn - a group of guys were playing Nerf football out front. They accidentally kicked the ball ontomy balcony. I soon heard a knock on my front door.
I found a lean, lanky young man with curly blond hair. "Hi," he said, "I'm Mark." He charmingly explained his predicament and I went to fetch the ball. "Hey, why don't you come over later?" he asked.
"Have a beer."
"Maybe I will."
And so, a couple of hours later, I wandered over for the first
time and I met my neighbor Bruce. Bruce was from Ipswich, Massachusetts. He used to live next door to John Updike, which I, as a would-be-writer, found impressive. As a boy, he had lived in Brazil while his engineer father supervised the construction of a bridge. Foreign travel added to his allure, gave him a sheen of glamor. He had impossibly blue eyes, a fine, fit body that I'd sometimes glimpsed from my upstairs window after he'd emerged from his shower with a towel around his hips. He was also very kind. He cooked for me and called me "dear." I'm sure that he called all women that, but the men I was accustomed to were always falling apart, incapable of taking care of anyone. Bruce was nurturing. He sometimes asked me to marry him (though he was only kidding).
He'd opened his apartment to this group of guys, his friends, who'd formed a band. Darius Rucker was introduced to me as Mr. February. He was featured on the Kappa Kappa Gamma's men of USC calendar. He joked that he was man-of-the-shortest-month because no one wanted to look at a black man for 30 days. Not true. Most of the women I knew agreed that he was handsome. He had a reputation as a ladies man. Dean Felber was laconic, a little shy. He'd gone to the same high school as Mark Bryan up in Maryland. Mark had a late night radio show on WUSC, the campus station. His DJ name was Styles Bitchly.
Back then, Hootie & the Blowfish was a cover band. They played songs by R.E.M., U2, Wire, and other alternative groups. I remember one song that they often played at those bonfire-lit week-end play-till-the-cops-come parties - "I Go Blind." They recorded it recently for the soundtrack of "Friends." When I hear it now, while I'm in my kitchen in Japan or pulling weeds from my garden, it takes me back.
I'm twenty again, sitting in Bruce's living room. I've just found out about Sylvie, a lovely young pianist who spent her childhood in France. I've lapsed once again into Plathian depression. The keg is tapped, everyone around me is drinking heartily. Darius sits down next to me. "Why don't you take me up to your apartment?" he asks.
I try to deflect his propostion with charm. College boys. It's like their hormones are constantly driving them. They leave no stone unturned.
"You don't like black men, huh?" Darius asks. He's half-kidding, but this implied bias irks me into honesty.
"No, it's not that. I'm interested in someone else."
"Bruce," he guesses.
I confess.
"He'll never ask you out," Darius tells me. "He's crazy about
Sylvie."
At twenty, art, love and literature - these were the things that mattered most. I had fallen in love, the unrequited kind, which somehow fit the image I had of myself. I thought there was something tragic yet noble about secretly pining. I'd seen "L'Histoire d'Adelle H." and it had struck a personal chord.
Though I may not have been exactly happy, I look on those days with bittersweet nostalgia. I was about to enter a world in which I wasn't sure I would be able to define myself. After "English Major," what would I be? Secretary? Waitress? I knew I couldn't count on writing to pay the rent. I wasn't even sure if I'd ever be able to publish anything. I was scared about that, too.
Darius was wrong.
One evening, I was standing in my apartment's kitchen and Bruce called up to my window a la Romeo.
"Hey, Sue! Do you want to go to that turtle movie?" He was referring to the film at the local art house, something with Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.
I feigned cool and yelled back "O-kay."
I still remember what I wore - black velveteen pedal pushers that I'd picked up at a church rummage sale and a black argyle sweater. I still remember what Bruce said: "You look marvy." I don't remember much about the movie or what we did afterward, but I remember a gentleness, a courtliness, that pure feeling of hopefulness when no one has yet disappointed.
A week or so later, Bruce and I spent an evening on his sofa
watching the Red Sox lose the World Series. We drank mimosas and wound up making out, then spending the night together in Bruce's bed. Though our moment of mutual passion went unconsummated, he forever after publicly referred to that night as "our affair." I didn't mind, though I wished it had been more.
After that, we settled into "just friends." I started going out with a guy in my French class who later left me for Africa, and Bruce dated a succession of un-depressed blondes. We both graduated. Bruce moved back to Massachusetts. I came to Japan to teach English. Darius dropped out of college and started working at a local Sounds Familiar record store. I went back to Columbia each summer. I saw Darius now andthen at the record store. We would talk about Bruce, ask each other how he was doing. A couple of summers later, I discovered that Hootie & the Blowfish were playing regular gigs in Columbia and I dragged along a friend to hear them play. Amazingly, they were now singing original songs and everybody knew the words and sang along! I was quite impressed.
The last time I saw them perform was during a visit to Charleston. I drove to the Low country to see my friend Fran, a genuine Southern Belle. She has a great apartment near the beach on Isle of Palms. Across the road there's a bar called the Windjammer. It's a true beach bar. You can walk in with nothing but sand on your feet and order a beer during the day. At night, local bands such as Dillon Fence and Edwin McCain perform on the narrow stage. On a Monday night Fran and I sauntered across the street, had a few beers, then took our positions in front of the stage. Hootie & the Blowfish came out and themodest crowd went wild. The band had already signed a recording deal with Atlantic, but they hadn't yet released their CD. In short, they were not yet nationally famous though they had sold tens of thousands ofindependently-released CD's on their own. Fran and I danced ourselves into a frenzy, danced with Darius' Charleston cousin who continuously shouted "Play the brother song!" He wanted to hear "Let My People Go," a song which concerns racism from the "Kootchypop" album. These days original songs have replaced most of the covers of the early days. Which is not to say that the band has forsaken covers entirely. Even now, Darius will occasionally belt out a Barry Manilow tune or the boys will erupt into a rousing rendition of "Mustang Sally."
I try to interest my Japanese husband in the band. He'll listen and dance around to the music, but it's not the same for him. When I crank up "Running From an Angel," I'm emerging from dark smoky neo-beat bars into the bright afternoons of late-summer. I'm sitting on my front porch with Bruce, watching the cars go by. I'm chucking my ennui out the window.
On a recent Monday night I was sprawled on the sofa, at the mercy of the flu. I turned on the TV, did some channel flipping. There were some news spots about a tunnel that collapsed in Hokkaido crushing a bus and its passengers. There were some cutesy cartoons and cheesy talk shows where the guests sit around talking about world issues while sipping umbrella-adorned drinks. And then I found a taped broadcast of the American Music Awards. I watched. There, in the audience, sitting right behind Mariah Carey, were the guys who'd kicked their football on my balcony. As usual they were wearing baseball caps and grungey clothes. They seemed a little nervous when they went onstage to accept their award for best new band, but they also seemed the same. Throughout the show snippets of their songs burst into my living room. I listened and I swear to you that my fever went down. I felt much better.
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