I didn’t even want to go in. Walking by, listening to Modest Mouse, thoroughly disagreeable, when I was signaled to. One could argue I wanted to go in the whole time. Why argue?

So many beautiful women, arms pressed to the sides of their chests, emphasizing their breasts, wearing summer dresses and heels, drinking white wine and discussing the Sex and the City movie, which point they cried, which dried apple husk is the one they most resemble.

In the room women come and go

Speaking of Gwyneth Paltrow

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Thirty-five year old men, their hair spiked as to form a hedge around the male pattern baldness, convinced of their hipness and wearing sunglasses in a bar. Evolution should have done something about this by now.

A disappointment comes from this, and grows into anger. Being jostled by these men, overweight and stuffed into form-fitting $85 t-shirts, as they elbow their way past me to order another $14 drink, yammering about nothing and pussy.

So how should I presume? I wasn’t supposed to be unknown.

Late night. The fuck-couples forming at the edge of the crowd, talking intently, each lowering their voice down a little more as to draw the other closer, just grazing hands, gentle, exploring touches.

I know my smile is too forced. People misinterpret my facial expressions. The DJ in Plonk is playing terrible dance music a little too loud, and the one guy, that guy, is dancing by himself, trying to pull cocktail waitresses into his whirling sphere. I don’t think he’s as drunk as he seems. He has on expensive shoes.

The three friends, moments away from knocking drinks over in homoerotic wrestling, ordering more shots of Cazadores. Jon Lamb, the bartender, openly hostile, judging everyone.

I shouldn’t be wearing this shirt. That guy’s a douchebag. I want to fuck that cocktail. That woman looks like the Cryptkeeper, only in more expensive jeans. Her tits remind me of volleyballs, unyielding as she brushes by. Forty-five year old recent divorcees cruising for men, women, either. Ron Kinnear, with his goatee trimmed too tightly to his mouth, encourages the cocktails to sit on his too tightly worn jeans, his vodka grin tied too tightly to his face.

The lighting is offensive, forcing your eyes to work to focus, making everyone strained, on edge, pretending to be in a relaxed pose. Should I order another drink? I’m rapidly running out of money and will have to ask a friend to spot me soon. Is it worth it? Am I at that magic number of drinks which makes me stronger, better looking, smarter and more interesting?

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

It wasn’t supposed to end up like this. I was convinced of that. I was to be the center of well-deserved adulation, people thronging around to hear my latest bon mot, laughing hysterically as I eviscerate them good-naturedly yet hilariously, just drunk enough to be fantastic.

Not leaning on a speaker cabinet to hold myself up as I hold a conversation with a woman who’s looking progressively more annoyed with me as I attempt to talk myself back to the center of my sentence, hoping to string enough words together to have make the whole exercise legible.

Not sweating a little too much for the temperature, wandering in and out of conversations that don’t involve me, looking for someone to interact with, something to lean on, some reason to stay here.

Getting home, trying to work my computer, looking for the perfect song, the one that will inform my ideas of myself, soothe me or make me angrier. Stomping around the house, emotions wildly out of control. No one can possibly understand how deep I am. That’s why they all left. After several start/stops, it ends up being the same song, on repeat, over and over, till I pass out. Soothing and angry, Unsatisfied plays until I wake at the crack of noon, hurtin’ for certain.

Even as an emotional, self-absorbed no-one-really-understands-me-I’m-so-deep teenager, I still found them annoying. Watching this video again makes me angry.

More of the Travis Koch mixtape series.

I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to come up with something nice to say about, “How Soon Is Now?” I’ve come up with nothing. It was the song I always fast-forwarded through.

You see, it’s not that I don’t think the Smiths were influential, or important to some bands (Death Cab For Cutie, etc.), and it’s not that I think Johnny Marr was a bad guitar player, or even that Morissey couldn’t sing.

Frankly, I think they’re boring. And annoying. And whiny.

I spent an entire summer, the year “Good News For People Who Love Bad News” came out, listening to that record over and over, and it’s obvious influences, The Cure and The Smiths, trying desperately to decode them. I tried to understand what was happening in the U.K. during that period and what, exactly, could give rise to a style of music so inoffensive as to be offensive.

By it’s very nature rock and roll is self-obsessed. That’s why we make mixtapes of it, that’s why it plays like our own personal soundtrack, that’s why teenagers connect so deeply with musicians and bands. It often sounds like our own internal processes being broadcast with guitar.

Yet, maybe, there’s a line that often gets crossed, one where the music moves away from internal discussion to one of frank masturbation, overblown emotions and wrenching, soul-crushing introspection. Silliness.

I read an article on Morissey’s resurgence among Latinos in Los Angeles. There’s apparently an explosion of Smiths cover bands, with the coifs perfectly coiffed and all the lyrics in Spanish. The article went on to draw comparisons (perhaps a little stereotypically) between the overwrought emotions in the music and Telemundo and the hot-blooded emotional Latino culture. How did this music rise up in England?

I suppose, though, in the interest of fairness, that one could say, “Well, Horton, the lyric ‘I am human and I need to be loved,’ could have easily been written by the Beatles or any other rock band working in that pop music tradition, that the basic expressing of desire is a fundamental component of rock and roll, and that I’m selling the Smiths and The Cure short by not giving them their rightful place among the canon. You could say that I’m not giving them their due within the post-punk new wave era of 70’s and 80’s England, and that their influence is still felt today, I mean, Morissey is still recording and Marr is with Modest Mouse now.

Those are all true things. What’s nice about music, and art, is that I can have my opinion about it. And my opinion is—The Smiths suck.

I forgot to mention that Mazzy had grown up in a nice Catholic family. She had gone to Catholic girl’s school and loved to wear the uniform out on the town. She turned me on to Frank Zappa and loved his song ‘Catholic Girls’. I can see her singing the title lyric with her lips pulled back in a sneer to expose her suggestive overbite. Since I moved to Montana I have met one dental floss farmer.

Inspiring story, Horton–the throat punching and all that. It’s time to introduce Mazzy (name has been changed, here), who was to me a true mistress of the mixtape.

It is 1990 and I am 19 and living in Reno. I haven’t yet learned how to get into bars, so I spend all of my time at the hippest bistro this side of the Sierras–Deux Gros Nez. (’Two Big Noses’) It’s especially hip because it was founded by two road-biking geeks and you can smoke in there and eat focaccia. I’m rolling ‘Drum’, drinking lots of coffee and drawing pictures on napkins.

Chris (later to be known as ‘Earthman’) is working behind the bar pumping espresso, blending frappe’s, and making ‘egg things’ (steam-wanded eggs in the microwave–surprisingly good) Chris is gorgeous in a truly stellar way this evening. EVERY woman who sees him is affected. He is an over six foot tall blond viking scot and has a ten-inch mohawk. He is captain of the UNR varsity cross-country running team and is tan. He’s wearing a tuxedo shirt with the sleeves ripped off and a bolo tie. His shoulders are cut and toned and he is smiling like a farting baby. He loves serving people way too much food and he’s good with his chef’s knife.

Chris was then to become a good friend of mine for a few of the following years. I have some great pictures of him at the ‘100th Monkey’ protest at the Nevada Nuclear Testing Site where me and over 800 people were arrested in one day. He had forgone the mohawk for dreds…Earthman. That bastard threw the frisbee so hard it hurt my hand every time. But for awhile, his new girlfriend Mazzy was to cause some needless tension between us. This is what I remember of meeting her…

I can tell by her smile that she’s the babysitter that tickled the infant Chris. She is wickedly cute. She has golden-red ringlets pulled back from her green eyes and freckles. Her eye shadow is retro-seventies chartreuse and she probably has glitter on her shoulders and cleavage. But that smile, oh baby. She has naturally prominent and pointed eyeteeth giving her a predatory slope, but the gleam in her eye is pure, sweet, dope-smoking honey. She’s wearing jangling bangles and hugging me for our first greeting. I am noticing that being thin hasn’t stopped her from wearing a tight dress. It’s cream lace, short with tassles–kinda flapper. She has some sort of drawl and calls me ‘Honey’ and ‘Darlin’. She asks me what I’m ‘drawin’ ‘ and launches into a breathless and truly engaging story about bad fairies or something, I don’t know. I’m blushing and trying not to look at her nipples. Passingly jealous of Chris’s ‘find’ I’m probably wondering if a mohawk would make me look taller or shorter.

I am entrusted to entertain Mazzy until Chris gets off work. We smoke dope on the roof and she entertains me. Mazzy and I become friends.

The time threads are blurred together now. I don’t think that I find out she’s a prostitute until the night Chris wrecks his motorcycle. She works at a legal brothel. She’s the first one I meet, but as I grow into the Reno bar scene, I know quite a few. Sadly see friends who were girls switch from waiting tables and going to school to turning tricks. And come back and wait tables or tend bar…Prostitution isn’t for everyone. Mazzy is making lots of money. “I just spend it all on lingerie” She says.

So, she and Chris fall in love and he pushes her to finally quit the ‘house’. It is one of her last nights working there when he goes to pick her up and flips his Yamaha on a speedbump in the dark of a Carson valley whorehouse parking lot. I see them both that night at ‘The Nez’. He is O.K.. He’s bumped and bruised and has a sexy scratch on his forehead and they are still in love and she moves into his tiny apartment.

I fall in love for my first time with Ron’s girlfriend Roberta. Ron is not worth telling stories about. He was into Queensrych. He dumps Roberta, I start dating her, Ron drags me down the steps of Deux Gros Nez on Halloween night and messes up the Adam Ant costume Roberta has made for me. Months pass. Chris and Mazzy are buying stock of Astroglide-lube and I’m making every mistake possible with Roberta. Apparently Chris is making some too, because suddenly Mazzy is moving into my spare bedroom. I don’t remember how that all happened, but I know Roberta and Mazzy were becoming friends and I loved that, and Chris thought I was boffing Mazzy.

I remember her underwear of every color hanging on almost everything that protruded in my house. It’s not that they needed drying, I think Mazzy just liked to decorate with her g-strings, thongs, bras, camis, nighties, and stockings. She had an egg-shaped vibrator that she liked to leave lying around, too. Her cat would bat it up and down the hallway. I didn’t mind. Roberta made fun of our crazy ‘manufactured home’ that we rented from my sister.

I remember Mazzy telling me that “Chris thinks we’re ‘doing it’ because when he saw you last, you were yawning alot and looked nervous.” I’m so honest that I probably was nervous just because I’d thought about sleeping with her. Roberta was to dump me soon, but I never slept with Mazzy.

Mazzy decided we needed to have a housewarming/St. Paddy party. What I remember of that is armwrestling and puking whiskey. I remember walking from my master bath into my master bedroom and trying to nonchalantly join a conversation after having just puked out my pancreas. Then my head lolled back and I passed out standing up and hit the carpet chin first. No-one even caught me! I heard later “You totally bounced, dude!”

When I woke up in my waterbed (yeah. seriously. God those things make you sweat.) with Roberta I couldn’t open my mouth and had to ask her who punched me. ‘Jameson’ she said. Then Mazzy got me stoned.

Anyway, I think Mazzy first gave me a mixtape after Roberta dumped me. I was a mess. On one side of the tape was all Camper Van Beethoven from Key Lime Pie and the other was probably a bunch of Grateful Dead. Camper Van really lightened the load. I played them alot. Mazzy and I sang Cat Stevens songs together when I wasn’t blasting Camper Van. Yep. That’s the Mazzy I remember. A Sexy Hip Hippy who used to work the houses and read lots of Tom Robbins. I remember her driving her silver Celica delivering portrait packages for Olin Mills Photography, where she got me a job as a telemarketer. I remember her riding on the back of Chris’s motorcycle (they got back together) in short cut-offs and a fringed suede bikini top with her Capt. America Helmet and cop sunglasses. I remember her coming out of her bedroom at three in the afternoon wearing very little. She and Chris had just broke some humping record so we did bong-loads and listened to Violent Femmes. I remember her screaming at me when she found out me and her younger sister had ‘fooled around’. It’s tough to tell a girl her younger sister is ‘old enough’…I just had to take it and put on a sorry face. I remember her smoking lots of cigarettes with plastic in the filters…what are they called? ‘True’ blues?

Last I knew she was dealing blackjack and getting married, not to Chris. I could tell many more Mazzy stories. I’ve been to the hotsprings with her. I know what and where her tattoos are. Crazy Chick. I’ll always think of Mazzy when I hear Camper Van Beethoven. I know it was Tom Robbins and alot of great late 80’s/early 90’s music got her through the long bright days living at the Kit Kat Ranch. I hope she’s rich as a hell, now.