Jimmy Frog's Jumpsuit
Or
This is What Dalton Did
By Mickey Hess
New Year's Eve, 2003. Danielle and I have been
invited to a party at our friend Tracy's new house, right down
the street from our own house, both rented. I am excited to
go to this party, if nothing else because I can walk to it.
My mother instilled in me a fear of New Year's Eve drivers that
prevents me from drinking even one drop of alcohol, and that
generally causes me to leave parties early, to strategize peak
drunk driving hours and avoid them. I have left parties at 12:01,
assuming the drunks are still singing and hugging each other.
I have rushed Danielle out the door at 11:42, with the plan
of making it home before midnight hits and all drunken hell
breaks loose. There are other reasons I hate New Year's Eve,
but this is the only unique one.
I hate New Year's Eve because of the built-in
nostalgia, because of the pressure to have a good time. "Come
on, it's New Year's Eve!" I hate it because people make
promises to themselves. But Tracy's party is promising. Planned
weeks in advance, it relieves the pressure I put on myself to
find something fun to do. Right down the street, it leaves me
with only the task of choosing bright-colored, preferably reflective
clothing, and checking crosswalks meticulously for drunk drivers.
The spirit of the season, though, had me waking
up New Year's Eve morning at seven AM. My downstairs neighbor
was in the front yard, screaming, kicking out the friends he'd
brought home from a dance club only three hours earlier. I know
they'd been at a dance club because I could hear their immediate
reminiscing the first time they woke me up, at four AM. Or the
first time for this particular night, I should say, because
this has happened before. Many times. I have spoken to Zach,
our neighbor. I have slammed the heel of Danielle's boot into
our floor/his ceiling, then walked downstairs to knock on his
door and drive home the point. I frowned at him outside in the
courtyard the next morning.
But this time it was New Year's Eve. At seven
AM I made a promise to myself. A resolution. I would speak to
the landlord. I would tell him "Zach is too loud. His friends
are too loud." This is what I did this morning. An instant
gratification New Year's resolution. Over and done with. The
way to do it. The ones that fail are the ones you can't do that
same day, ones that take multiple days of commitment, like quitting
smoking, losing weight, or being generally nicer to people.
Now it is nine PM, twelve hours after Danielle
and I spoke to the landlord, and Zach is knocking on our door.
Twelve hours has changed his life. He wants to thank us for
speaking to the landlord. His hair is newly-clipped, almost
to the skin. He's smiling, and tells us he just came from church
with his mom. "I haven't been to church in … man,
years." Zach is going to be quiet from now on. He's not
going to stay out late drinking. He's going to stop smoking
pot. "I just wanted to say Happy New Year's," he says,
"And tell you I'm gonna change a few things."
I don't know how to react to this. All I wanted
him to do was not blast Lil Kim at four in the morning. I feel
guilty that my one complaint, my New Year's resolution to take
a stand on the noise downstairs, has led him to make so many
changes in himself. But it is New Year's Eve. Shouldn't I be
happy for Zach, say "good for him," and take pride
in whatever small part I might have played in his transformation?
No. Not at all. When he leaves I sit back horrified at the chain
of events I have set into motion.
Fucking New Year's Eve. Look what it does to
people. It's the combination of a focus on change and a focus
on nostalgia. The holiday jerks us around. And it piles up,
on top of Christmas and before that Thanksgiving, until on January
2nd we're left to dig ourselves out of whatever emotions the
season has prompted, unnatural emotions like self-improvement.
Goddamn all I want to do is just leave this quiet building,
leave Zach downstairs with that placated smile on his face,
boxing up his hookah and his memories until three weeks from
now he pulls them out and calls up his old friends. Leave with
Danielle and walk down sidewalks to Tracy's party, where we'll
kiss when somebody yells "It's midnight!" and look
at each other assured we'll be together for another year. Tracy's
New Year's Eve party, where I can get pissy drunk and have no
further to travel than two cobblestone blocks on foot.
Danielle puts on her black skirt with the hooker
boots, then her make-up. She looks good. New Year's Eve good.
I ask her to call up Tracy just to make sure we remember the
house number. 1013 or 1015, one of them. All the old houses
look the same in this neighborhood. In the bathroom, making
faces at myself in the mirror, I hear Danielle on the phone
expressing surprise. "You're where? Nashville? What the
fuck are you doing in Nashville?"
And in that moment I know Tracy has deserted
us, driven three hours south to see one of those faux white-trash
bands she appreciates so much. I know she's drinking at a bar
in a grimy club, and that maybe later she'll tackle a guitarist
onstage, like she did Jimmy Frog at that show in Bloomington
last year. A six-foot-six, forty-year old indie-rocker dressed
in a green-sequined jumpsuit with giant angel wings, and Tracy
rushes the stage, climbs on top of him and commands him to "Get
naked!" Jimmy Frog looks fucking terrified. He tries to
laugh, or at least play it cool, but all he can stammer out
is "You're tearing my pants."
It wasn't New Year's Eve that night, but it could
have been. The date wouldn't have meant anything to Tracy. Tonight
she forgot two weeks of party announcements to see a band that
will probably come to our town within a month or two. Not that
Tracy's totally without responsibility. She did invite Danielle
and me to two replacement parties, at houses of people we don't
know, from her cell phone in Nashville. "Just tell them
you know me." We don't do it, though. We give up on this
New Year's Eve, and it feels pretty good. We close the blinds
and do odd dances to rap songs from the early 1990's, my standard
format for reminiscing. At midnight we hear car horns and gunshots,
people screaming, but it could have been off these albums though.
Could have been off my old rap cassettes.
Click here to read Mickey's
The Erotic Shorthair
....
Bio: Mickey Hess wrote a book called Big Wheel at the Cracker
Factory. Prior to that, he wrote one called El Cumpleanos de
Paco. An Icelandic newspaper lauds his work as such: "Perhaps
it is unfair to expect a writer to have something to say."
Enjoy. www.mickeyhess.net
