Part 63: Xander

The strange thing about long drives on tour buses - this one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, a straight shot on the I-76, one of those routes that only exists to call the bluffs of people who claim to like driving or highways or America - is that they are not one experience but several. Looking back or forward, you can call it “the drive from P______ to P_______,” but when it’s hapening, it’s Watching A Movie or Listening to Music or Napping or Having a Conversation. The main difference from real life is that each of those things is less enjoyable, less itself somehow. Still, they’re necessary, if only for the way they help us to carve up the time. Unbroken highway is unendurable.

Xander was in the process of transitioning from Watching A Movie (some insipid comedy which only bothered trying to be funny for the first twenty minutes or so) to Staring Out The Window Thinking About The Past when the bassist effected a transition of his own, from Solitude to Company. He plopped himself down in the seat next to Xander, leaving the guitarist and the drummer sleeping or pretending to sleep in the back, cracked his back as a pretense, and said heavily, “So.”

“So,” Xander responded, trying to remember where their last conversation had left off. The bassist had an air of wanting to resume, to revisit something. He'd given Xander homework, but Xander had forgotten.

“So I just read The Letter,” the bassist said. “Long bus ride, nothing else to do, or else I wouldn’t have bothered, to be honest with you. But it was actually decent. On the short side, definitely - read more like an excerpt from a longer work, but I imagine that’s the long-term plan - but the writing itself was decent. I was pleasantly surprised.”

Xander, having committed himself to staring out the window, continued to stare out the window. Mile marker 232; trees, sky. “I’ll be sure to pass along your compliments.”

“So you’re sticking with you didn’t write it, then?”

“Well, it’s the truth, so . . .”

“And you’re not doing some changing-nature-of-identity, the you who wrote it isn’t the same you that you are right now, can’t stick your foot in the same river twice bit?”

“It’s not a bit,” Xander snapped, turning to the bassist. “I mean, not like that’s what I’m doing and I just don’t like the word bit, but like that’s not what I’m doing. I didn’t write it. No version of me wrote it. Xander Cross didn’t write it. Alexander Krassner didn't write it, either. Am I being clear enough? What can I say to get you to believe me?”

“Alright, alright. I believe you. I was just trying to throw the book at the blind man to see if he’d catch it, so to speak. But enough past, let’s talk future. Have you thought about what I said last time? You are still going to write the album, yes?"

Xander decided to only answer the question he understood. “I suppose. I pretty much committed to it last night, didn’t I?”

“In a sense. Although it would be a rock star move to announce an album like that and then never actually make it. It’d be your most popular album ever. Like Shakespeare said, heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are even sweeter.”

“Our most popular album,” Xander corrected him. “This is still a band, you know.”

“Only when we’re on stage or in the studio. Right now we’re just two individuals having a conversation.”

“No, I’ll write the album. I want to write the album. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

Xander sighed, glanced out the window. Pittsburgh: 190 miles. “Bobby called me earlier, and he’s got all these . . . stipulations. Requirements. He wants me to write it so Christians think it’s all a Christian allegory but no one else even considers that it could be. So we don’t alienate anyone or get pigeon-holed as Christian rock. Which, like, I’d rather work at the post office than do Christian rock, but still."

“And was it an order?”

“An order?”

“Right. Like in the military, they tell you when something’s an order. In real life, of course there are still orders, but people don’t use the word as much.”

“Yeah, I think it was an order,” Xander replied, wondering if the bassist had been in the military in one of his past lives. How little they knew each other.

“And are you thinking it will be difficult?” the bassist asked. “To create something only Christians know is Christian? You know, that was basically the entire Middle Ages. Lots of material to draw on.”

“No, that’s not it. It’s just . . .”

The bassist didn’t bother to say “just what” this time; it was implied.

“It’s just, like, I feel like if he wants it done a certain exact way, he should be the one to do it. Don’t make me do it. Artist not a jukebox, type of thing. And I know that’s exactly how he probably wants me to feel so that I can channel it into the album, since the main character’s supposed to be this oppressed laborer type figure, so I know he’s manipulating me, and kind of mocking me, too, since he thinks I’m into this method acting shit, but . . .”

“But isn’t that exactly what you were frustrated about before?” the bassist probed. “That Bobby did go ahead and write the story himself? As you claim.”

“I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“And weren’t you struggling with creativity before The Letter was written? I’ll use passive voice, it’s safer. I seem to remember some grumbling.”

“I wasn’t struggling. I was just . . .”

“You were struggling,” the bassist said decisively. Xander accepted the word, since he didn’t have an alternative. “So, if you’ll allow me to summarize: you don’t want Bobby to write things himself, you don’t want him to give you guidelines on what to write, and you don’t want him to leave you entirely on your own. Which does beget a certain question.”

“What do I want, I know. I don’t know.”

“You know, in certain traditions of thought, the lack of desire is the greatest possible achievement. The Buddhist, the Epicurean. Perhaps you have reached the pinnacle of human experience.”

“I’m sure this isn’t the pinnacle of human life,” Xander said. “Anyway, I didn’t say I didn’t want anything. I said I don’t know what I want. There’s a difference.”

“Of course."

“I want,” he continued, not knowing where he was going with it, “to figure out what it is I want. Other than that, I mean. What else I want. And I do want to make some progress on this damn album. I think I said that already.”

“You did. But this time you may have actually meant it. It’s a very different thing to say ‘I want to write the album’ in response to ‘Do you want to write the album?’ versus in response to ‘What do I want to do.” The bassist paused to let this land, squinted, peered. “You do realize, I hope, that it doesn’t matter what you write.”

“Because they’ll buy it no matter what? Now you sound like Bobby.”

“No, I’m speaking in a more philosophical sense.” That got Xander’s attention. Philosophical was one of the words that titillated him, the way some people perked up if you tied the discussion to sex or violence or Shakespeare. (He’d suspected the latter might be another of Xander’s triggers, but it had failed.) “Let me pose a question to you, and this is a question for you to answer with a percentage. Approximations are fine.”

“Alright.”

“What percentage of the reason that people go to an OBM concert is actually OBM?”

“Well, obviously it’s not a hundred,” Xander conceded. “There’s the social element, there’s the exciting atmosphere, there’s wanting other people to know where you are . . .”

“Right, right, but I didn’t ask for a list. If that’s part of your process, so be it, but what I’m looking for you to do here is to give them all a percentage, add them up, and subtract it from a hundred. But if you don’t want to do all that legwork, it’s not an order. Just an estimate would be fine.”

“I don’t know, seventy? Seventy-five percent?”

“Less. Undoubtedly less. My own estimate places it somewhere between five and ten percent. Though of course human motivation is hard to quantify. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful endeavor to try. I find it enjoyable, anyway, call it a hobby.”

“Five percent?” Xander sensed the bassist was being intentionally provocative. But what a long bus ride does for enjoyment, it does the inverse for tolerance. “Alright, fine, let’s have it. What’s your theory?”

“Well, you’re right about the other reasons,” he began. “Or you’re not wrong, at least. You’ve given them the right names, but I suspect you aren’t conceptualizing them in the fullest way. When you say social, I imagine you’re thinking of the positive aspects of socialization: friendship, camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and so on. But there are also the negative: annoyance, frustration, hatred.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with dualism," Xander said, starting to feel patronized.

“In a superficial sense, perhaps. I hear your writing every night, remember. I expect you would say something here like: the light can’t exist without the dark, the positive and the negative are both necessary parts of the experience, the bad is what gives the good meaning.”

“Is that not what you’re saying?"

“No. I’m not saying that, unfortunately, the world is set up in such a way that we can’t have good without bad and we must accept it. Or 'embrace it,' whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. I'm saying the bad experiences are valuable in themselves. Not in how they relate to the good ones. Hatred is pleasurable; annoyance is pleasurable. And that's why they're really coming to the concerts, to have the bad experiences that they crave."

“Why the hell would people do that?”

“What do you mean, why? That’s the unsplittable atom. That’s as far down as it goes. Well, that and sex. Impressing others, alleviating boredom - those are the two most basic human drives. And clearly you aren't motivated by the former."

“They’ve split the atom,” Xander grumbled.

“Oh, come on. Don’t start acting like you don’t understand figurative language this late in the game. But haven’t you ever gone to, say, a grocery store where there’s no one else there? 10 AM or something? And you just walk through and get your groceries and leave? Don’t get bumped into, no one in your way, all green lights on the way home. Isn’t it kind of disappointing?”

Xander thought of the wooden owl in his backpack. “It’s definitely less interesting.”

“You’re not quite there yet, but maybe in time. Interesting still sounds like a term of the naive understanding.” Xander felt a sudden urge to hit him, but held back. “But I can tell you one thing for sure: you wouldn’t go back.”

“Hm.” Xander turned to look out the window again. Mile marker 198.