21. Remembering Cool
On a road trip through Sufjan Stevens' album and how much closer to cool twenty years will get you.
We are at The Homewood Suites in Decatur, Illinois. As we parked in the abandoned mall parking lot to check into the hotel yesterday, I couldn’t stop humming the Sufjan Stevens song and thinking about wild alligators.
We drove through a few cities mentioned on Stevens’ record, and the weekend turned into a roadtrip review of the album only about twenty years after the album dropped but apparently only months after a version of the album was put up as a musical by the Shakespeare Theater in Chicago.
The courtyard of The Homewood Suites is filled with a Tuscan-ish tile, a fire pit that warmed my feet last night while I read The Bee Sting for a family book club. Slightly Christian pop music filters out of speakers disguised as rocks, and I sit under a pagoda that looks out at sparrows making nests in the gutters under privacy curtains closed tight.
I’ve never been to the small cities of Illinois, and the day after we celebrated Juneteenth with Brandon’s friend outside of Champaign, I was strangely excited to see a few towns in what I previously had deemed nowhere Illinois.
However, after visiting Decatur’s downtown, I can see why Sufjan Stevens and his siblings maybe hated their step-mother for taking the family there. All abandoned businesses and drug deals by the center city fountain, the solitary server at the one business open on a Sunday took a long look at the three of us and seemed very hesitant to serve us even takeout food. We left after reading three plaques about Lincoln.
But Decatur and all, this weekend was a piece of paradise for my family. A swimming pool at the hotel had Goose pretending she was a fish for a day and a half—a grin that’s all dimples shining on her face for more than twelve hours. She woke up saying, “Pool! Pool!”. And something about the weightlessness of the water, the weightlessness of leaving Chicago for a few days, has me grateful, reflective, our family pulled together by some gravity of time I couldn’t have expected.
We’re coming into our own, and I feel myself steadying into adulthood. I feel such a relief being in my thirties at this point—a relief to be in Decatur Illinois humming along to Sufjan Stevens songs from twenty years ago. A relief to be in this body, in this personhood, in this place—a relief to be myself. And it wasn’t always the case—it’s been the exception to the rule for decades.
From sixth grade to starting college, I was always on the awkward edge of things: I wasn’t accepted, and I certainly wasn’t cool. Now, decades later, I get to just be me—it’s an unbelievable relief—one I didn’t think I’d ever see.
“Can You Feel the Illinoise?” came out right between high school and college for me. And Rachael gave me a mixed CD with all the songs she loved off the album with a whole bunch of Weezer and Arcade Fire songs in between and Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) at the end because Rachael was always laughing about a song like that—trumpeting about its merits in ways you couldn’t predict or stay ahead of.
You’d pin Rachael down as this niche artist who regarded popular music as swill just for her to shock you by dragging you down the street as she danced to Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) as you shared a set of headphones. It was cool because she knew it was cool. It was cool because she convinced you it was cool.
Rachael and I spent our lunch periods hiding from bullies at the sushi restaurant across the street from school, or getting lost in the conservatory a few blocks away, or watching clouds while sitting upside down on the park benches a few blocks from the lake. We were losers in our high school of 280 people, and we rarely missed a day of being taunted or harassed by kids with families with wealth I couldn’t conceptualize at that point—Pritzker wealth, Jordan wealth, top advertising companies in the world wealth. Wealth kept bullies safe—they could do just about anything and rarely were they held accountable. So Rachael and I stuck together: two burgeoning artists keeping one another safe.
The difference between Rachael and I was that all the bullies knew that they hurt me. I spent more time crying in the nurse’s office than I did in my Algebra 2 class, and the bullies knew they got to me—they reveled in it. But Rachael never let them know. They stole her shoes during gym class, cut them up for fun, shoved the scraps in her locker, and she put her backpack on and walked home barefoot. In Chicago. She told me she cried when she got to the train station.
Why would they do that? she asked.
Because they could. I told her.
Why would they do that? She asked.
Because you have something they’ll never have. Would have been more true.
Everyone knew Rachael was cool, and I didn’t know anyone else who was at our school. She looked down her nose at you when you said you didn’t know the Violent Femmes, had a strange subtle doppelgänger situation happening with Scarlett Johansson, developed her own film every week even though she didn’t take the photography classes, and then—during her senior year—was accepted into one of the best art schools in the country. She didn’t try to be anyone else but who she was no matter the consequence—against all odds, against all shoe-stealers and assholes and doubters. None of it ever seemed to touch her.
I don’t think I ever learned how to be cool like that—ever learned to be cool at all.
Some people learn cool early.
Nearly every spring from when I was four to when we moved to Chicago, my family took a giant trip down to South Carolina with all their friends—and the kids of their friends. It was a maze of mini-vans following one another, and we all stayed in one house together when we got there. I always wanted to be in a car with the only other kid really close to my age, Ray.
There were people who were cool, and then there was Ray.
By middle school, when we stayed in South Carolina, I’d ride a bike everyday: over wooden bridges, through lagoons, close enough to the beach to hear the waves. I’d slowly take my hands off the handlebars and pedal harder, howling through a smile—what a thrill.
When I was with Ray, I didn’t howl. At 12, Ray was already into Hunter S Thompson and Metallica and stealing wine coolers from the town store with his cousin who sometimes met us there. I was old enough to submit to peer pressure but young enough to feel a deep sense of wrong around anything that had been subtly labeled as “adult” by my parents. My moral coding was very simple, generations of Catholic upbringing had left my occasional church-going parents with a simple flowchart for me to follow: Does it feel complicated? It’s wrong. Is it wrong? You are deeply personally responsible if you do it. Did you do it? The only way forward is to feel ashamed for the foreseeable future.
I tried to stay the hell away from anything that felt like it might be wrong, but Ray didn’t seem to have been taught the same helpful flowchart. When a few bullies told Ray to, “Go to hell” one day. He hissed back at them, “Don’t you know I’m a Christian scientist?”
Ray was cool in a way that was not in my genetic makeup, and against all flowcharts, I hung out with him whenever I could. My parents were pleased because they loved his parents, and so we grew up together.
At some point, Ray told me that he was a secret agent in a war, but couldn’t tell anyone anything about it because it was classified. He told me I wouldn’t understand while he fed crickets to his giant lizards in his bedroom, and I watched with wide eyes as the lizards grabbed the crickets in the death grips of their tongues and disappeared them into too-wide mouths.
“Is it safe?” I wondered.
“Of course it’s not safe,” he said, rolling his eyes while he put his shoulders back. “It’s necessary.”
He showed me how he hid in the shadows of his backyard, how he knew the right way to aim a weapon, how he could hear the smallest footstep from yards away. I tried to copy his movements, unsure what was real anymore. Was this wrong? Was it my fault for believing him? Was the war in our own minds or was this some cosplay of his favorite game Duke Nukem? This was a language I didn’t understand, but I chalked it up to me—this was some part of cool I hadn’t learned. So I followed him, listening and watching, rolling through a leaf pile when he told me to, and going home just before dark.
One day I came over to Ray’s house, and his mom told me he was upstairs. When I walked into his room, I asked him how the war was going, and he screamed at me that people died and I wouldn’t get it. He pushed me out of his room, told me to get out, to go home, to leave him alone. I tried talking to him through his bedroom door, but he kept telling me to leave. Eventually he threw one of his mom’s business cards under the door with a scrawled Leave me the fuck alone. I took the card, read it, and walked down the stairs—leaving it in the dish by the door.
I biked home with the wind at my back in the cool fall near-night, slowly lifting my hands off my handlebars, leaving what I didn’t know behind me—what a thrill.
Years later, Ray had a kid right after Sufjan Stevens’ album came out. Ray’s mom told my mom that he’d named his son after one of his friends from elementary school who had to return to his home country and was killed.
A real war after all. The two of us in his backyard playing at it, but for him a real worry, the fear that had him directing us to roll into the leaf piles, and the pain—real too.
Sometimes the real world feels so make believe that only kids know how to process it.
I haven’t ridden a bike in a year or so, but the last time I did, I held the handlebars as tight as I could with both hands. But right outside Decatur, I turn the volume up as I listen closer to Can You Feel the Illinoise?. The wide open wonder of sky opening up all around, I drive us all the way home.
It's not exactly constructive feedback, but I've firmly believed you to be the coolest person I've ever met, and that belief became part of my heart on day 1.
It's kinda funny looking back - thinking about the kids who were labeled as the cool kids by others, and then who I thought was cool. There was never any overlap. When I look back at the popular crowd in the hazy memories from when I was 12, they all look 20. Like somehow their cool as status made them seem older and distant to my young point of view.