In the fall of 1997, I started college at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I would ultimately end up attending Berklee for just three semesters. I left after the first two semesters when my hands went bad, and went back for one more semester in 2004 for one last ill-advised grab at living the dream and becoming a film scorer. During the first year I lived in Boston, it became my home and I made great friends of the people I lived with. Even these days, 12 years later, I have the rhythm of that city in my bones more than any other I’ve been to. Some nights when I lie in bed I still feel the thrum of the T.
There are some things about Berklee that don’t make it into US News and World Report. One is the importance of money: Berklee is very expensive, and while you have to be talented to succeed in the school’s hot-house environment, you have to have dough – or an extensive future-smoking-debt-hole of a financial aid package – to get in.
The other thing about Berklee is that it is truly a microcosm of the music industry. As a student there, you don’t just learn to play your instrument, although you certainly learn that, out of necessity. You also learn how to network. Sometimes this requires sitting with a guy named Raine at lunch because he performed with LL Cool J the night before as part of the Berklee Gospel Choir and now he might Know Someone. Other times you get to hang out with a guy named Edan The Humble Magnificent as he freestyles about bitches ‘n’ twinkies ‘n’ farm-subsidies.
And sometimes you have to pack up both of your roommates – Danny the gay singer-songwriter from a Mormon Army family in Utah who looked and sounded like Elton John; and Jay, the CrackerBaller, the white Tupac / King Diamond expert in the mail-order KOOL baseball jersey who said he was from Detroit but was really from Sterling Heights – and go to the 99 Joints album release party in some gutterflat in Allston. Here you proceed to meet some new people, you see that cellist you think is really hot, and then, somehow, you end up dancing on a kitchen island to “The Big Payback” by James Brown at 3 in the morning, all the hours since midnight a black blur.
This is all hypothetical.
Very early in my first semester, John Scofield came to Berklee to perform with one of the top student quartets and give a speech. I remember that night really well because a) Cami, who was from Austin, was supposed to be my date to the concert and the party afterwards; b) I was wearing a sportcoat for the first time, representing for the Berklee Intelligentsia as not just an instrumental scholarship student, but also as a composition scholarship student, which I thought was even better; and c) I had stolen, briefly, a hat to match my coat from a friend named CJ: a twill ivy cap that had a patch sewn on to the back, one that name-checked a ska band called The Toasters.
The party was going to be in between the Back Bay, where we lived and went to school, and Allston, where plenty of other college students in Boston lived and went to school. It was going to be in an apartment building on Kenmore Square, one mostly populated by Boston University students. The first time I’d seen the building was when I looked up after leaving the Kenmore IHOP late one night to see a couch, perched seven stories up on the un-barricaded balcony of a brownstone. A kid was passed out on the couch, a 40 of Mickey’s near to hand. It may have been a trick of the light or the angle, but it looked like he would fall to his death if he tossed and turned a little too hard.
The night started to go wrong when I saw Cami bopping by with some other dude as I waited outside the Berklee PWC.
“Cami!” I hollered.
“Oh, hey Josh.” She went in for the hug. “What’s up?”
“I’m waiting for you. For our date?”
“Oh, you dumb bastard!” This was a term of endearment from Cami, as were the terms sonofabitch and motherfucker. I’m pretty sure that once, at a party, she called me a huge-dicked Galilean, apropos of nothing and certainly without direct evidence. This is just how Cami was. I hope she hasn’t changed.
“I’m going to a party instead! This is Chetworth!”
I don’t actually remember the guy’s name, but I never saw him again, so Chetworth works just as well. At this time I had very long hair. So did Dennis, the piano / comp major that lived a floor below me and Elton and Tupac Diamond. When we were hot or eating or had some practical reason to do it we would wear our hair in a ponytail. Chetworth was one of those assholes who meant the ponytail, whom you might even refer to as Ponytail in colloquial conversation. Cami told us later that he ‘didn’t like to touch unfamiliar things.’ So he will live forever in this story as Chetworth, the Protodouche.
Back on Massachusetts Avenue, where I was protesting: “Cami, goddammit, we were supposed to go to this thing together, and…”
Cami was already moving on. “I will make it up to you, baby, I swear. I have to give my demo to a guy.”
In most cases this would seem like a brush off, and it is entirely possible that in this case it was. But at Berklee this was a totally acceptable reason for ditching out on or missing almost anything. She kept her promise, too: she made it up to me later by singing a song, just for me.
So I went to the Scofield thing with Felix instead. Felix is a Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx. He introduced me to the Wu-Tang Clan. Felix could be seen stalking Commonwealth Avenue and listening to beats on an old ghetto Walkman tape player at all hours of the day or night, rapping along with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He was a good friend and a lot of fun to party with, despite (or sometimes specifically because of) his tendency to drop freestyle rhymes into conversation, after which he would carry on like nothing unusual had happened.
An example:
Me: “I don’t know about those omelettes Willy [the Berklee cafe cook] makes.”
Felix: “What’s wrong with them?”
Me: “I dunno, I mean, they are tasty as hell, but he makes them on the same grill where he cooks every-”
Felix: “Willy spits flames from his grill / that’s how you know his shit is for real / I ask him where he come from / he say ‘NEW ORLEANS’ / so then I say he oughta make / RICE AND BEANS / A DO RUN RUN RUN / I DO RUN RUN AWAY FROM THE COPS AIN’T NO MAN STOPPIN’ ME’S FROM POPPIN’ THESE RICE AND BEANS”
Me: “Oh hell, I bet a rice and beans omelette would be fucking awesome.”
Felix: “Say word. I would eat the hell of that.”
Once you got the hang of it, it actually sort of revived the lost art of conversation. And really, wouldn’t Victorian dinners have benefitted from dope rhymes? At least a little?
At the Scofield speech, he told us about how important our generation would be, that we would be the next ones in the streets protesting and standing up to those that would otherwise exert their sinister will on the world. He must be pretty disappointed thus far.
After the event at Berklee we had a slice at Little Stevie’s House of Pizza a few blocks down and then made our way from Boylston over to Commonwealth Avenue. We avoided the T. In the late 90’s, the Green Line was slow as hell in the Back Bay and around Boston University. They’ve since added trains and a new Silver Line with additional busses. The times I’ve been back to Boston, the Green Line has seemed much faster, but I still heard kids complaining about how long it takes to get anywhere.
We joined up with some other pals along the way, Elton / Danny and Tupac / Jay included. The party was your typical arrangement for a Boston college party: amazing building, dimly-lit hallways, too-small apartment with one Party Lane To The Keg, walls coated with revelers. Drinking and shouting ensued largely without incident for about an hour.
And that’s when the Snack Cake Mafia arrived. I wish, lo these many years on, that I had taken control of the PR between my group of friends and the SCM, if for no other reason than to ensure that we saddled them with a better gang name. Pant Weasels. Nipple Blips. The Shark Jets. Those Rock Band Assholes. Anything would have been better than Snack Cake Mafia, a term invented by our friend Debbie, owing to the fact that the small, impish one that seemed to be their leader had a last name that sounded similar to the word ‘biscotti’.
I don’t remember how the feud started, and the details probably wouldn’t make any sense if I did. Whatever it was, I am certain that everyone involved was probably largely undeserving of each other’s ire. But the story also won’t make sense if I frame it that we should all have been friends but weren’t, so here: For the sake of argument, let’s say that my group of friends included a magical unicorn named Charmander. Biscotti killed Charmander, he shot him down in cold blood after suffering some lesser transgression. This is why we hated him and all of his friends.
The SCM took a strategic position, closer to the keg than we were. This means they only had to pass us once on their way in, but that we would have to pass them each time we needed a refill. No one went to get more drinks. We were all quite drunk and so every murmur or sidelong stare became an offense, a slight, leveraged psychic warfare.
I got tired of the stalemate. I wanted to drink more.
“Give me your cups,” I said. “I’m going in.”
Cups were handed over and I deployed to the breach, shuffling through the throng to the front line. As I passed by the big awkward one, a goony dark-headed guy who was bigger than me – Debbie had given them all nicknames after pastries and snacks, but I can’t remember what any of them were – we bumped into each other. It was probably an accident. I had my back up, but my focus at that moment was Delivering Beers, not Justice, so I kept moving.
“Watch out,” Big Awkward said behind me.
I wheeled on him, sloshing beer around. “You watch out for your fucking mouth, shitneck.”
He looked surprised. I turned back around and made the rest of the 20 yards to my friends.
Someone asked, “What happened?” I relayed the story of how he’d stuck his shoulder out and then called me a fag.
“That motherfucker,” said Felix.
“No no,” I said, suddenly the voice of reason. “Let’s not over-react. We’ll take the high road.”
I often took on this role, where I would get over-excited about something and then counsel caution and reasoned thinking to everyone around me after I’d riled them up. It was a convenient role – I can talk one hell of a game and I have always been able to – but it was contrived. I thrive on conflict.
Things were relatively quiet for another 30 minutes or so – as quiet as a party blaring Led Zeppelin’s IV at 700 watts can be – until the SCM gathered up to go once the keg floated. I was totally hammered and Felix was too. Felix had been describing what he would do “to any motherfucker that steps” in great detail when they passed by.
I know that not remembering is a common theme in some of my stories, but I figure it is best to tell you where the holes in my recollection are, lest some Wikipedia article or scholarly paper be written about me later on that says that I made shit up, shit I claimed was true. My stories are true-ish – I wasn’t rolling tape when these things happened, and this is the best recollection I have.
And so I’m not sure who did or said what, but somehow, in the space of 30 seconds, I went from talking with Felix to being held back by him and Tupac / Jay. I screamed “I WILL STAB YOU IN YOUR FUCKING SHITNECK, MOTHERFUCKER” as the SCM phalanxed around Big Awkward, keeping us apart. I threatened to stab him in his shitneck with various things – a pencil, my cock, etc. – and they left and then, shortly after that, we were asked to leave.
A few years later, after leaving Berklee, I saw Big Awkward on MTV. I’d heard that he’d left Berklee not too long before I did and that the SCM had largely disbanded. I knew that I was at Berklee either with or in very close chronological proximity to plenty of famous people, like Paula Cole and Norah Jones. I didn’t know that Big Awkward was on a trajectory to make it, or that he would go on to win Grammys and be a rock star, but he was, and he did, and he is.
Anyways, that’s the story about how I threatened to kill John Mayer.
I wonder, were you to run into him today, if the feud would reignite?
I seriously doubt it. As far as I can remember, we were both sort of the fringe people not heavily involved in the feudin’ and fightin’.