Contrast teaches us who we are. We most easily recognize our gifts—or our shortcomings—as we recognize how we stand apart from others.

I learned about my gift in a longstanding series of early morning, Mountain Dew-fueled arguments.

Derek and I loved to debate, about anything. We were bright high school kids, he two years older than me, and after we met, we each realized we had found a sparring partner. We’d argue about morality, politics, economics, whether or not that movie we just saw sucked. When we really got going, our friends would sit back and spectate; it was apparently something to see. We’d agree on the big things. If anyone else challenged one of us, Derek and I would meet on our common ground long enough to claim the field as ours, and then we’d retrench and relitigate the minutiae of our disagreement. But for all our accord and shared love of debate, our brains worked differently.

Derek has the quickest mind I’ve ever had the pleasure of observing. In comparison, I am a more deliberate thinker. I explained it to people this way—

Virtually all individuals, it seemed to me, could trace a path of thought from A to B, and a lot could then proceed from B to C. Some could then make the final step to D all alone, some more could see D with assistance, and others would never be able to reach that final conclusion. I was generally able to move along the steps efficiently, A to B to C to D. But Derek was special: he didn’t need all the steps. Show Derek point A, and with barely a moment’s thought, he would fully understand point D.

My comparatively slower mind did have one advantage over Derek’s, though. He could have difficulty explaining his conclusions. With a touch of think time, I could do more than move from A to B to C to D. I could explain all the steps to others. I could find the right words, comparisons, examples, parallels, or whatever else I needed to guide another along the path. I could help people learn.

Derek got a job with the Department of Defense. I got a job as a teacher.

The English teacher who secretly dreams of quitting his job to write bestsellers is a cliché. It is also not me. I love writing and I work at it, but my true gift is for teaching.

built this settlement,

buried his daughter:

1793, Genesee fever.

Sex offenders live near her grave.

At night we hear the freeway:

rushing ghosts of our children

following lamps away

Once there was the Chat-a-Wyle,

Known for miles, the Chat-a-Wyle,

Once there was the Chat-a-Wyle,

The diner on Main Street.

The Colonel strides in the moonlight to

pitch-pine tavern, whiskey,

drinks to his pilfered land of

crumbling sidewalks,

proud churches,

neighbors on porches,

closed kindness,

dollar stores, feral cats.

He took this land for his people:

rugged white father,

unreckoned sins

Country steak and sticky buns,

For old and young, sticky buns,

Country steak and sticky buns,

Coffee salad bar sweets.

The city down the interstate makes:

ethnic cuisine, fiber optic filament,

specialty glass, opportunities for

engineers and immigrants.

Our town makes:

off-color jokes and pie.

Locked up dark with for-sale sign,

Staff resigned, for-sale sign,

Locked up dark with for-sale sign,

Stale air and cobwebbed seats.

The Colonel grips his musket in moonlight

scouring the dark for dark skin.

Your people feel you, Colonel Williamson.

The plaque in the park bears your name.

We dwindle safe in the town you made;

we nestle below the highway and

hobble to childless death.

I provide my service, and then they pay me, or they don’t. It makes no difference to me. I murder their children, or I don’t. That makes no difference either, because, you see, piping is not about the money. I buy nothing. Merchants can offer me silk gowns or mahogany chairs, jewel-studded mirrors or plates of finest porcelain. I have no home; I have no need for a hoard of bric-a-brac. Neither do I need coins for food or drink, or lodging, or ferrymen’s tolls. I have my pipe, and it provides.

When they give me money, I throw it in a river.

Piping is about power. A town feels distress because there are locusts, or barbarians, or pathogens or drug addicts. Or rats, of course. The problem becomes a plague so that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put their peace together again, and then I am there with my offer. It can all go away, for a fee. Money can dispense with nearly every ill in our world if people have the will to part with it.

Sometimes, I am accepted, and the contract is fulfilled. I play my melody and lure the bad things elsewhere—often to another town, though the desperate rarely ask questions. I do my work; my patrons give over the demanded sum. They work so hard for that money, and then they must watch me waltz away and hear my jingling pockets.

At other times, I am refused. The people clutch their bills and coins and suffer on like the fools they are.

And sometimes, more often than you might think, I meet those who are not only fools, but thieves. They lack humility. I perform on my pipe; they cheer to be free, but withhold what is mine.

I drowned the children of Hamelin. I led them to the Steinhuder Meer, all of them dancing and laughing for fifty kilometers, even as their shoeless feet bled on the stones of the road. I played my pipe and they danced into the waves, giggling even while the mere filled their lungs and they died in water scarce over their heads. The muck, too, obeyed my pipe and swallowed their bodies below. The thieves of Hamelin might have found their children with ease if only they had known the tune.

I play those notes myself, whenever my work brings me nearby. I stand on the shore with my pipe and all the dead children rise to float on the waves. I play, they bob and I can hear their parents’ wails on the wind; I pause and listen. Once the cries fade and the bodies sink, I move on to the next plague in the next town.

The world is large, and I know many tunes.

Jack held up the third loaf of bread.

“Did you lose count in your cart?” she smiled. “Sixty is young for your mind to be going.”

“Well, one of them is olive oil and rosemary, and you never know how much toast you’ll want.”

Lindsay studied the kitchen counter.

“We didn’t get the place a toaster yet, did we?” he asked.

Lindsay shook her head, lips pursed in amusement. Jack had known the expression since their first date in college, dinner before Chariots of Fire, though she had smiled that way less often since their daughter and grandchildren had moved across the country. Her look made Jack happy. They had arrived less than four hours ago, but Lindsay had already drawn youth from the lake.

Jack pulled their one skillet from beneath the counter. “Here. We’ll make our toast the old-fashioned way.”

“We? Toaster or not, when was the last time Jack Hamilton made his own toast?”

“I can make toast.” He gestured with the skillet and clanked it down on the burner. “I can rough it.”

“Yes,” Lindsay said, “rough it.” She took his hand like a schoolgirl and led him to Black Dog Landing’s sitting room, where windows ran the length of the cottage. “It’s a hard knock life by the lake.”

From their position on the dividing bluff, Jack and Lindsay could gaze at most of Keuka Lake’s western branch. The first snow had begun falling, large flakes that dissolved in the waves or lay on the wood of their dock. Since the property had become theirs, they had spent just one other night in Black Dog Landing, in October on the closing date. There had been no other time, not until these days between Christmas and the New Year. We should do something, Lindsay had said, after Gina’s family goes home on the 27th. He had asked what, and she had answered, We should go to the lake. He thought the travel would be too much trouble, but the next afternoon, Lindsay had spent hours with photo albums of their old vacations, and Jack relented.

He put his arm around her. “It’s ours,” he said.

“It’s ours.” She squeezed him. “And not just for a week.”

“For good,” he nodded. “For always.”

She chuckled and pointed to the far shore, three-quarters of a mile away. “Remember that house we rented over there, across from the state park? Where the wind picked up the table’s umbrella and shattered the glass.”

“It was further north, but I do. I remember writing an apology and paying the bill, too.”

She leaned in close, putting her head against his chest. “Well, now it’s all ours to break.”

Her reflection in the window appeared young, with her hair dyed its cherished auburn and the light obscuring her gentle wrinkles. Jack looked old beside her. He could no longer call his mustache salted and peppered: it was grey as the thin hair he blamed on office stress. He carried more weight than he should, so that his doctor had begun to mention blood sugar and cholesterol. He could exercise more when he retired next year, or the year after. He would swim from the dock every morning. He and Lindsay would paddle every day from May till October, not just for a stolen week at a rental every half decade or so. He looked to the yard below their second-story deck, where snow whitened the nose of the orange tandem kayak he’d purchased with the house. Long hours and fiscal prudence had yielded rewards: in retirement, the bluff on Keuka Lake would be their home for seven months each year.

“The snow’s really picking up,” Lindsay observed.

“That’s why we have three loaves of bread.”

“It’s a romantic place to be stuck.”

“We won’t be stuck long,” Jack said, “which is why we could come. The temp will hit sixty in two days, and all of it will melt. All eight to ten inches.”

“It’s crazy,” she said, “sixty in December.”

“That’s climate change for you. But it’ll get the road clear.”

“When do they stop maintaining it?”

“The sign says no maintenance November through March. It’s not worth the effort for them to plow the road for these vacation homes on the bluff. Which means you shouldn’t get used to this Christmas getaway.”

“No,” Lindsay said, “but just this once, stuck will be nice.” She pecked his cheek.

“Thank you, Jack.”

#

He woke just before dawn to a strange sound. Several foggy seconds passed before Jack realized it came from Lindsay. She made urgent, speechless groans, and the left side of her face drooped.

#

They had first rented Black Dog Landing 25 years earlier.

“I can’t find the goddamn light switch anywhere,” Jack had said.

“Me neither!” Lindsay laughed.

They had to dine beneath a dark chandelier that first night, until their daughter found the switch. It was on the rail post for the stairs, which they had passed a dozen times.

“Who puts a light switch on a railing?” Gina asked.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Lindsay said. “There are a lot of quirks to these old places.”

“Construction was less standard when these cottages were built,” Jack told their daughter, “and they were only meant for summer homes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember how steep a hill we drove down? A few inches of snow would make it totally impassible. People don’t live here in winter.”

“No, I mean what Mom said, about quirks in old houses. Are there more?”

Lindsay smiled. “We’ll find all the quirks we can, and we’ll know them all when we come back next year.”

But they had not returned the next year because Jack had to prepare for a merger, and then had to train new staff, and then oversee combined departments. Six years elapsed before they returned to Black Dog Landing, so Gina had been 17 instead of 11 and spent much of their vacation on the phone in the kitchen, more interested in calling her boyfriend than exploring.

#

“Lindsay? Lindsay!”

She gripped his wrist and made the same desperate groans. Her left arm dangled uselessly at her side. She was crying.

“Hang on, Linds. Just hang on.” He picked his phone up from the nightstand and dialed 911. It did not ring, and no one picked up. As he hit redial, Jack saw the empty bars and the asterisk showing no signal. He threw off the sheets and dashed to the wifi router in the living room. No lights shined green. Jack groped the dark kitchen wall and picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone, and he left the receiver dangling from its cord to run in his pajamas to the porch.

The snow rose halfway to his shin and buried their Lexus. He could not tell where their yard ended and the road began. He looked left and right for neighbors’ lights but saw none—of course there were none. But two houses over he saw a fallen tree and wires down beneath.

#

Black Dog Landing had not been available during their later vacations on Keuka Lake—he figured a new owner had been less inclined to rent—but five years before their purchase, he and Lindsey had rented a cottage just a few hundred yards down the bluff. Kayaking north, Lindsay chirped, “There it is!”

Jack recognized it immediately. When Lindsay browsed rental property listings along the lake and, less often, when they found the week to stay in one, they still compared the houses to Black Dog Landing.

Lindsay held up her phone. “I’m texting a picture to Gina. I’m asking her if she remembers where the light switch is.”

“It won’t go through, Linds. There’s no signal here.”

“Just sent! We must be out far enough from the bluff.”

They had paddled a while more, until they drifted alongside the beach at Keuka State Park. People of all ages swam. Outside the lifeguarded area, a father and daughter threw a tennis ball into the water for their black lab. Jack and Lindsay drifted and watched for a long time.

“We should come here more often,” Lindsay had said.

#

He wrapped the blanket around his wife’s shoulders and held them. He looked at her nose because he could not bear the fear in her eyes.

“The lines are down, so we have no phone, no wifi and no signal. Even if I dug out the car, we’d never get it up the hill. We have to go on the water.”

Lindsay shook her head.

“We have to, Linds. We have to. When we’re out enough from the bluff we’ll have signal. I can make a call. I can get you to the park. It’s open year-round. Road crews probably already have it clear, and they can have an ambulance waiting. I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

She groaned. When he turned back toward her, Lindsay looked at him sadly with her drooping face, as though she expected him to understand. “I’ll be back,” he said, and she did not try again.

The second story deck had sheltered the kayak’s back half. Snow had gotten into the front seat where Lindsay would have to ride, but there was no other choice; the one paddling had to sit in the rear. He gripped the orange plastic and dragged it backward out of the snow. He grunted with the effort of flipping it over, lifted and dropped the nose three times to bang out what snow he could, then flipped the kayak right-side up and pulled out more snow with his hands. He had forgotten gloves inside. With the seat as clear as Jack could make it—he would grab blankets, towels—he hoisted the kayak onto the drifted white and shoved it: the boat slid a couple feet until the nose pushed down into the snow. Jack trudged beside the boat, lifted the front forward, and pushed again.

A few rays of sun emerged from behind the clouds. Flakes drifted lazily from the sky. Lindsay had planned for him to get the fireplace burning while she made coffee, and then they would watch the sunrise together.

He lifted the kayak’s front atop the snow a third time and pushed toward the shore. They could not use the dock: stepping down from it into the boat would be too precarious for Lindsay. He’d help her in on land, then shove the kayak into the water. He’d have to step through the lake to get in, carefully. His feet would be cold but alright because they had to be, but if he dumped Lindsay into the winter water she would never make it.

#

He had never kayaked before college. He had only done it then at Lindsay’s urging.

“It’ll be fun,” she said, “and a trip is a trip,” so he’d ridden in the student activities van with the others to the south end of Keuka Lake. An alumnus who had hauled the kayaks on a trailer gave them lifejackets and brief instructions.

“What if I flip it?” Jack had asked.

“Then you’re wet. Stop worrying,” Lindsay said.

The lake had been calm that day, so after some early wobbles, he avoided overturning. He paddled beside Lindsay for two hours that afternoon. He felt sunburn on the ride back to campus and did not care, and he knew he loved her.

“I haven’t gone for a paddle since camp, when I was a girl,” Lindsay had said. “I forgot how good it feels.”

#

“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

“I think my wife’s had a stroke. We need an ambulance.”

“OK, sir. Tell me your name and address.”

“Jack Hamilton, Lindsay is my wife. We’re off West Bluff Drive.”

“Sir, that’s a seasonal road.”

“I know. We got snowed in, but I’m going to get her to Keuka State Park.”

“How are you transporting her?”

“We’re in a kayak.”

“Jesus.”

The snow picked up again and the wind blew it into his face. He looked at Lindsay’s slumping back ahead of him, surrounded by water and gray clouds, bundled in blankets. He had pulled her pink knit cap over her head. “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Yes, sir, I’m here. I’m sending an ambulance to the park. How far away are you?”

He tried to remember. “I think thirty minutes. I’m paddling as fast I can. Maybe less. What about a boat? Is there a rescue?”

“Not at this time of year, but I’ll try, sir. What’s her condition?”

“Lindsay, honey, how you doing?”

He thought he heard a groan. The wind made it impossible to say.

“I don’t know,” he told the operator, “but she can’t speak. I need to keep going. I need my hands.”

“We’ll get you help as soon as we can.”

Jack dropped the phone into his lap. The operator might have said something more but the wind swallowed the sound and it did not matter. He gripped the paddle and resumed churning the water. The kayak was built for two paddlers, but he was not too old to fight. His arms ripped the paddle through the lake, creating little eddies beside the boat. They passed another cottage. He’d had to paddle so far out to find signal that their progress along the shore seemed slow, so making it beyond each building required dozens of hurried strokes. Jack had taken off his coat because its bulk impeded his movement. Each lift of the paddle flung droplets onto his bare arms, freezing pin points atop burning muscles. His feet had burned after he splashed through the water by the shore, but now they had numbed.

“Look at the snow, Linds,” he called. “Look how it falls into the water. If you look close, you might see some of the flakes melt into it.” The burn in his forearms intensified. He did not know how much longer he could sustain the pace. “We only ever came in the summer,” he said, “and not as often as we should have. It’s pretty in winter. You were right about this, Linds. We should have done this all the time. And we will now. We will.”

His burning forearms pulled, and the kayak moved forward. The nose hit a wave at an awkward angle so the water splashed over the nose. “Sorry, Linds,” he called. “Sorry about the splashing. I know your coat’s warm, but I wish I had more blankets.” He fought the acid forming in his muscles and forced the paddle through the water, left then right then left then right. “I wish we had a motorboat,” he said. “I wish a lot of things.”

#

“We could stay a few days. Come on Jack,” Lindsay said. “Live a little.”

“We don’t even have the furniture here yet,” he had said. “We’re sleeping on an air mattress, for God’s sake. I am too old for an air mattress.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“The sofa set won’t be here for another two weeks.”

“So we get some folding chairs,” Lindsay smiled. “We might not have furniture, but we have a lake house, Jack. For real now. What are a few days on an air mattress? Just look at those leaves.”

Gold and red surrounded Keuka Lake. The little cove by their dock reflected the blazing yellow of the maple shading Black Dog Landing, and when a breeze blew past them on the deck, dozens of the tree’s seeds spun their way to the ground and water.

“We could rent a boat,” she said.

“I bought their kayak, you know.”

“And we’re going out for a paddle this afternoon, but I mean a party boat.”

“Party boat?”

“Like my uncle used to own. A pontoon boat. We should buy one. Can you picture Gina and the kids on it, cruising around the lake with us?”

“We’ll see. Maybe after I retire.”

“I know, I know.” She reached her arms around his neck. “But for now, we could still rent one.”

They had driven back the next morning. Jack had to prepare for a meeting.

#

The boat steered directly toward them, and no other vessel was on the water. He pulled harder, though his forearms begged to slacken.

“That’s help, Linds,” he called. The wind had eased, but if she replied he still could not hear it. “See that boat? That’s them. Hold on, honey.” His paddle shoved the water behind them, and the kayak pushed over the waves. Lindsay sat huddled in the blankets and her knitted hat, framed by the lake. Snow fell gently around her.

Jack pulled the paddle through the water, left then right then left then right, each lift spraying more drops than the last as exhaustion eroded his form, but he pulled the paddle through the water and gritted his teeth against the burn.

“Get her in!” someone shouted as the pontoon boat pulled alongside. Two men lifted Lindsay from beneath her arms. Jack could see the state park a hundred or so yards away. He saw a brown pickup with a plow driving through snow, an ambulance trailing behind.

The two men had laid Lindsay on the pontoon boat’s bench. A woman leaned close to her pink knit cap and face, while the man in the navy coat helped Jack aboard. He stumbled so the man had to catch him. “I’m sorry,” Jack said, “I can’t feel my feet.” He fell onto the bench and watched the woman kneeling by Lindsay hold her wrist. She looked at the man in red beside her with widened eyes and shook her head tightly, then stood to begin chest compressions. The man more slowly shook his head, then restarted the motor. The pontoon boat lumbered toward the park while Jack shivered beneath a blanket and tried to understand what it all meant.

The orange tandem kayak drifted behind them in the falling snow. It rose and fell with the waves as their wake and the current slowly carried it toward Black Dog Landing.

###

The great lakes would swallow you,

the ocean not know you're there.

The Finger Lakes will cradle

and expand your life, and share.

Water a mile across.

Water an hour long.

Water white-capped in the wind

and glass at night when it's gone.

Stand beside it with some wine;

drink its bounty deep.

Smell and gaze and hear and taste.

Feel its breadth, then sleep.

You hear a white noise thrum before the three piano notes. They linger in your mind for a space, and then the next three piano notes resolve the phrase, that white noise thrum underlying everything. All of this will recur several times while you sip your coffee, strong and black, and you hear a bass note repeat with increasing frequency: it's pressing you, until a new pitch pushes the white noise upward into the second track and its expansive layers over the beat. Your mind quickens and your fingers come alive, yearning to type.

At least, that's how it works for me when I brew some coffee and put on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack to The Social Network. Other beverages are acceptable substitutes, I suppose, but there's a purity to drinking one's coffee black, particularly if you grind your own beans.

Happy writing.

The cart barricade shunts us

suspects past the wary checkout lord.

No one sane buys salad at midnight,

so management routes us to chips, beer,

and night-checkout man, tall and fifty.

We of the early morn file through

his glare that roves our

pockets for bulges and

rolls a teacher-poet

into the hoi polloi so that

for a time I do belong here,

for a time I am not marked

by education and station in

this low wage GED town,

my politics temporarily

indistinguishable from the camo-clad

MAGA man who also heads for beer:

comrade of twilight hours,

brother of the empty fridge.

They shelve the Bud and Keystone

an aisle apart from oatmeal stouts

and wittes. I meditate on pairings

for spinach-artichoke dip.

Nothing shouts out privilege

so much as the desire to doff it,

like a handcrafted cap.

My compatriot carries Coors

toward the self-checkout machine

that declines his card; he curses,

night check-out man scowls.

I pay and pass unobserved.

The truth is, I lack

sufficient they to feel

a bona fide we.

The truth is, I moved

to a town that will never forget

I’m from elsewhere.

The truth is, my beer

tastes delicious, and I deserve

dislocation and scorn.

COVID-19 got me at last, so I am recovering in isolation. (I am doing OK, all in all, and the rest of my family, who had it in April, shows no signs of reinfection thus far.) I haven’t been entirely with-it, mentally speaking: two days ago, there was this time I spent 15 minutes staring into space and debating if I should A) roll to the bed’s other side to grab a Gatorade, or B) keep staring into space. I am now feeling closer to myself and would really like to do some writing during my involuntary solitude, but I’m not sure how my words are going to work yet. This post is me taking a baby step. I watched four movies in the last couple days; they were pretty good. Let’s see if I can write about them coherently, editing a bit as I go but not worrying about revision.

In order of watching, the films are Mank, Gimme Shelter, Postcards from the Edge, and The Wages of Fear.

Mank (2020)

Alcoholic Hermann Mankiewicz writes the script for Citizen Kane, which I have watched annually with a class for a decade now and love. I’ve meant to watch this one since I heard of it, and I liked it. Gary Oldman is as good as one expects Gary Oldman to be. The whole cast is very good, and knowing Kane as well as I do, I took great delight in seeing the pieces come together. I’m not sure this is a movie for the casual viewer, but fans of Oldman or Citizen Kane should watch for sure. Streaming on Netflix.

Gimme Shelter (1970)

Documentary following the Rolling Stones tour of the U.S. that ends with the disaster at Altamont. I like the Stones and know the lore behind the Woodstock counterpoint, but had never watched the film before. The structure makes it timeless. The film opens with the band arriving and performing in concert to adoring fans, then cuts to the band listening to radio reports about the deaths at Altamont. This basic structure repeats: excitement of the band on tour, arrangements for the approaching free concert disaster, and repeat until it’s time for footage of Altamont itself. The striking footage near the beginning of the band processing (somewhat?) the events ensure the viewer feels impending doom all the way through. There’s no talking heads, no expert testimony: just skillful editing telling a story and showing the rock legends in their naive, turbulent prime. Streaming on HBO Max.

Postcards from the Edge (1990)

Following a drug overdose, a Hollywood actress has to move back in with her overbearing Hollywood legend mother as a condition for a film role. Based on Carrie Fisher’s novel (she knew a thing or two about recovering from addiction and famous mothers), Postcards is a movie for just about anyone. Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine play mother and daughter, and their relationship is as wonderfully drawn as MacLaine’s eyebrows. The movie balances humor and Cynthia Vale’s turmoil, and ultimately leaves the viewer feeling good. A film that features Gene Hackman, Dennis Quaid, and Richard Dreyfus in small supporting roles? Yes, I’ll take that cast. Streaming on HBO Max.

The Wages of Fear (1953)

Two pairs of truckers desperate for a big payday haul tons of nitroglycerine across treacherous mountain roads. This French film delivers all the suspense its reputation promises. The camera work is masterful: each angle, each closeup or longshot chosen heightens the suspense. The characters are types more than fully-realized people–and as Ebert noted, the exposition is a bit long and makes weak use of the one weak female character–but the drama of the transport is powerful and memorable. An excellent film. Streaming on HBO Max.

The writing verdict? I’m not all there yet. It’s movies, reading, and Twitter for me again today, but it felt good to give it a shot. If you've read this far, thanks for bearing with me.

All those pretty horses gallop away, running from the cities of the plain and into the expanse where I cannot see. Before they broke my hold I shepherded them as far as I could, or drove them—whatever the term is for horses. They want a land my borrowed words cannot paint.

I’m abandoned and flatfooted beside my faceless cowboy...

This story had been kicking around in my files for several months before it found the right home: https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2022/06/15/the-title-wouldnt-be-mine-either/ My thanks to L'Esprit Literary Review for publishing my odd little flash fiction.

“And if you don’t expect too much from me

You might not be let down.”

--The Gin Blossoms

“Hey Jealousy”

If you turned on a radio in the mid-90s, chances are you recognize the chorus of “Hey Jealousy.” The singer cheerily offers, “Tomorrow we can drive around this town / And let the cops chase us around.” If you listen no further, you bop along to the bright guitar line while you drive down the highway and belt, “Hey, jealousy!”

And for years, that’s all I heard—disposable pop rock glee.

And I was wrong.

The song opens with a request for a place to stay. The singer, “in no shape for driving,” asks if “I can just crash here tonight.” He has a history with the woman he’s asking: the singer declares her “the best I’d ever had.” But he blew it, somehow or another. (Booze seems likely, given the scenario, and another line hints toward infidelity.) Whatever substance-induced screw-up he committed, the speaker blames it for his being alone, looking for a roof.

And then that bright chorus kicks in.

You can’t help but be caught up in it. “Tomorrow we can drive around this town / And let the cops chase us around.” Which of us hasn’t, at least once, daydreamed about the kind of mischief that chorus advertises? The long arm of the law isn’t a real threat here. The chase is a game of cat and mouse starring Barney Fife as the cat. More mall guard than menace. Between this crystal-clear assurance of a Keystone Cops chase and the unmistakable “Hey, jealousy!” it’s easy to miss the line in the middle: “The past is gone, but something might be found / To take its place.”

And that’s the song’s hidden heart. In among the frivolity and the hooks and the playful bassline, there is a hole. The morrow’s mischief— if it happens—wouldn’t be a spontaneous frolic. It will be planned, and therefore fake. Think of the craziest story of your youth. Did you pencil it on your calendar? Chances are, it was sudden, splitting instantaneously from the ordinariness that preceded it. And that’s what the singer is missing here: he can’t manufacture the new joy. The past is gone, he recognizes, but he still wants to bring back a piece of it through force of will. And hijinks aren’t born from determination. Or loneliness.

The song’s second verse is heartbreaking. The first four lines:

“And you can trust me not to drink*

And not to sleep around

And if you don’t expect too much from me

You might not be let down…”

He has broken his first promise before he made it; a man too drunk to drive is asking for confidence in his sobriety. In this context, the promise of faithfulness sounds just as empty. He means to reassure this girl who got away, but with his intoxication having gotten the better of him, his words are more likely reminding her of his past sins. And yet it’s not exactly dishonest because as he stands there on her doorstep, he means every word. He wants so badly to measure up for her and to her, but at least in his own mind, he is destined to fall short. Hence the sad hope that “if you don’t expect too much from me / You might not be let down.” There’s a subtextual question in those lines. He’s a failure; he knows it. But surely, he pleads, he can still be worth something. Right?

The next two lines reveal the full extent of his desperation:

Cause all I really want’s to be with you

Feeling like I matter too

Whether that’s the bottle talking or not, it’s the truth as he feels it.

The song was written by Doug Hopkins, the Gin Blossoms’ lead guitarist. He co-founded the band in 1987 and saw it become a big enough draw in the Tempe area to lure a record deal. “Hey Jealousy” was the first single off the major-label debut, New Miserable Experience. The album eventually went quadruple platinum, but Hopkins never lived to see it: he shot himself on December 5, 1992, a few weeks after A&M Records sent him a gold record for his song. An alcoholic, he had been out of the Gin Blossoms for months. Reportedly too drunk to stand in his final recording sessions, Hopkins was receiving treatment for alcoholism at the time of his death.

A listener’s first impression of “Hey Jealousy” will be of high spirits, both because of the melody and the most audible lyrics of the chorus. That’s the façade. The truth becomes clearer if one more closely examines the intonation of the title. The optimism sounds a little forced, the voice a bit more plaintive than pleasant. A drunken man is trying so very hard to sound hopeful.

But “Hey Jealousy” isn’t really a love song, or even a devil-may-care invitation. It’s a confession.

*According to Wikipedia, the band changed the lyric to “trust me not to think,” but Hopkins originally wrote the version printed here.