Spotlight ON! Joey

I was going to borrow a theme from Erin this week and do a series of interviews with people close to me, but after conducting the first interview with my college boyfriend and it taking up five pages in Microsoft Word, I think this week will just be that interview, in serial form, which I’m sure will amuse a total of four people, but man, those four people are going to be really amused. (Hi Tony! Hi Emily!)

Spotlight ON! Joey
Installment the First: Meeting and Greeting.

Joey was my college boyfriend. We started dating when I was 19 and he was 21, and we broke up just three days shy of four years. Joey makes the best mix tapes of all time, plays the drums really, really hard, and your parents would love him. He was the first guy I could laugh with like a friend, not a guy. He lives in North Carolina now, and if you go to a show in the Raleigh-Durham area, he’s the one up front, yelling the loudest.

SB: I remember meeting you when I was out with my friends one summer night. You had green hair and I thought you were funny and cool, but Tony asked if you wanted to meet up with us later that night, and you said, “Nah, I have to go hang out with my old lady,” and I thought, “Wow, I hope no one ever calls me their old lady.” LITTLE DID I KNOW.

JZ: Actually, I remember officially meeting you once before that, at a dive club in a really awful Tulsa neighborhood. Our buddy Phil was playing in a band that night, and Tony had brought you out for a night on the town. I was the merch guy, and I plied you with a sticker and said, “Hey there, cutie.” But not in a cool way, more in a gross old-man kind of way. I’m pretty sure you rolled your eyes at me.

SB: Yeah, I thought you were just that kind of guy who hit on everyone, until one night when Laura and I drove up to your school for some party, and you were schmoozing us up, and all of the sudden you stopped in the middle of your sentence and said, in a completely different tone of voice, “Wow, you have really pretty eyes.” And of course, anyone’s a sucker for a compliment, but it was the first one you ever gave me that sounded really sincere, like you surprised yourself by noticing and saying it. You were on my radar after that.

JZ: So, technically, our first date was some sort of forced double-date action with Phil (again!) and your friend Boothe. He later sabotaged his chances with her by giving her a mix tape on, like, the second time he ever saw her, and it was chock-full of the melancholy strains of Radiohead and Yo La Tengo. Speaks for itself. Anyway, we went to some play and it was lame.

SB: It wasn’t Phil on the double date, it was Tony, who of course later dated Emily and now they're married. Phil didn’t manage to fuck it up with Boothe until the following weekend, after the Fish Under the Sea Dance, because she didn’t like the way he kissed. And Phil gave that sad mix tape to my roommate Christina, not Boothe, but it really was the most half-assed attempt to woo a girl I’ve ever seen. It started with “Why Bother” by Weezer and ended with “Accidents Will Happen” by Elvis Costello. I think his girlfriend had just dumped him or something. Anyway, yeah: that play we went to sucked.

JZ: But the next weekend, we had our real first date, which is probably the best one I’ve ever had. There was a dance at your university called Screw Your Roommate, and you rounded up a posse for my loser pals, and we all went together. It was still fun to get dressed up, so I spiked my hair and put on a tie, and I even had my mom pick out some flowers to give you. It was on the top floor of a skyscraper, looking out on the rest of the city. I remember sitting with you in front of these huge windows and just talking talking talking about love and romance, and where we were in life and what we wanted to do in the future. Yeah, that pretty much sealed the deal right there, I was pretty taken with you from that point on.

Kind of hilarious, considering I was wearing these huge Sally-Jesse Raphael glasses, and had sideburns shaped like hockey sticks.

SB: Oh man, those glasses! I liked the sideburns, though. It was 1996! They were hot! Screw Your Roommate Night was definitely the beginning of it all. There’s a picture of me and Emily from the party in my dorm room later that night, and you can practically see the stars in my eyes. I skipped a midterm to drive to your school to see your band play a few nights later, and you had made me a mix tape, and from then on out, it was just understood that it was on.

Next: Friends & Family; Bob Pollard’s Shot Glass; Breakup & Aftermath; All the Ways In Which Sarah Is Annoying