Ticket Tuesday: R.E.M.
On associating one concert, and a whole lot of my life's rich pageant, with the friend who was right there with me ... and still remains
Every time I look at this concert ticket, memories come flooding back.
With winter exams officially over, I was flying high on the fumes of a second quarter of college completed — and so was my friend and roommate, April. We couldn’t wait to get back to Riverside for spring break. (That’s a phrase I’ve never uttered in the 37 years since … but it was our hometown, we’d been missing our friends and families, and we were merely freshmen.)
After tossing our bags in the wood-paneled station wagon I’d inherited from my mom, affectionately named “Bertha,” we got in the car and I turned up the radio. As per usual, it was tuned to 91X, which alerted us to the fact that R.E.M. would be playing the San Diego Sports Arena that night.
A few wide-eyed glances later, April and I pondered the possibility of going to the show, and decided to head south instead of north on the freeway.
“Do you really think we’ll be able to get tickets?” I asked, and April assured me we would.
Her enthusiasm was like a freaking virus, and soon we were both even more amped than we’d been about getting through finals.
Bear in mind, this was the 80s, when securing concert tickets required lining up at The Wherehouse or another outlet. So we were relying on the possibility that there would still be something available at the box office, or that a scalper might be willing to cut us a deal since we were poor college kids without much cash.
I can’t remember the exact details or negotiation tactics involved — only that we could not believe our luck when we found a guy out front selling a pair for 30 bucks each, in the 10th mother-effing row.
Stand
Robyn Hitchcock opened — and I’ve loved him ever since — but I could barely contain my excitement when “Pop Song 89” kicked in. April and I began dancing like maniacs, with me jumping as high as humanly possible to every beat. A few songs in, I did suffer a fleeting moment of imposter syndrome. After all, I’d inherited my love for R.E.M. from my older brother so … was I a legit fan?
Then, Michael Stipe declared the San Diego audience to be infinitely better than L.A. the previous night, disintegrating any doubts. April and I were obviously the best fans ever — especially considering my stellar pogo-dance moves, and the way we were screaming out every lyric with perfect pitch. (Okay, maybe not every lyric, but I got a lot of them right … from “The One I Love” to “Cuyahoga” to “Finest Worksong” to “Swan Swan H,” my brother’s record collection served me well.)
It was also tough to feel like a fraud with April around. Not only was she a major music fanatic, she was quite possibly the most genuine person I’d ever met. I realize that word and all its synonyms — real, authentic, natural, organic, legit — mean next to nothing these days. But it’s the truth (oof … another empty word, especially when it comes to certain social media platforms).
Okay, I guess I’ll show instead of tell, as all dutiful writers are trained to do.
Begin the Begin
I’d known April since at least seventh grade, but we didn’t become close friends until the summer before our senior year of high school, when we went on a trip to Yosemite. Our mutual friend Hillel, who I’d known since preschool, had always been an outdoorsy little fucker, and he somehow convinced us and several others to join the expedition. (To this day, Hillel leads treks all over the world, and I’m eternally amazed by his adventurous spirit. But I digress…)
During the trip, our feet and muscles aching under the weight of our massive backpacks, April and I were easily the top two groaners, begging Hillel to let us stop every twenty minutes or so. At one point, April — who was tall, lanky, and a bit clumsy — tripped and took a serious tumble. Hearing her scream, I turned around and busted out the first aid kit, making her laugh through her tears as I cleaned and bandaged the wound.
A few days later, I found myself inexplicably climbing the back of Half Dome with the rest of the group until my nerves kicked in. About halfway up, clinging to the cables, I stopped and said, “I can’t keep going.”
But April, a few steps behind me, insisted, “Alexa! You can!”
By the time we reached the top, I felt invincible — although not quite enough to venture out on the infamous diving board with a few of the others.
At least the trek back down felt infinitely easier after that.
Senior year did too, thanks in large part to the deeper bonds I’d formed with April and the rest of the crew. We spent a ton of time together, on-campus and off, including epic parties and lunchtime excursions, riding in the back of Hillel’s Suzuki Samurai to Taco Bell … the Sub Station … anywhere we could escape the absurdity of high school for more than five minutes.
As graduation and college admissions loomed large and acceptance letters came through, April and I both decided to attend Revelle at U.C.S.D., and I asked if she might want to be roommates.
“Yeah, that would be fun,” she said.
I was elated, and a lot less anxious about starting the next chapter of our lives, knowing we’d have each other to lean on if we ever got homesick or stressed out — which we did on the regular.
I Believe
Living together was mostly a blast. We wrote papers together. We partied together. We pulled all-nighters in the cafeteria and commiserated over classes together. April had an especially easy time making friends, who she would bring back to the dorm like stray pets.
One time, when I returned from a lecture, she announced, “Alexa, I met a skinhead! He liked my shoes. He thought they were Doc Martens. You would hate him. He saw your Dukakis poster and started ragging on you.”
She was right — I didn’t like him at first. But April had a way of bringing out everybody’s softer, kinder, more accepting side. Eventually, “the skinhead” and I discovered we had things in common and even came to appreciate each other’s differences.
April inspired my love of music in a huge way. She taught me to play guitar, beginning with “Stand By Me” on her acoustic. When I got the chord changes wrong, she laughed and said my name in the most frustratedly amused voice.
She also taught me “Scarborough Fair” and then “Down in the Valley,” which I sang so relentlessly it drove her crazy — until I took it a step further and changed the lyrics in honor of our friend, the “skinhead,” who was always bragging about the size of his penis:
“Skinhead’s penis, is not very big / It is as tiny, as a skin-colored twig / Where is your penis? Oh where can it be? / Sometimes I wonder, how Skinhead can pee.”
April couldn’t get enough of the new song. Skinhead was not as amused, but I think he appreciated it on some level.
Another thing that blew me away: We’d barely started school when April landed an underground music show on KSDT, the college radio station. Yes, it was at two in the morning, but she was killing it, playing Bauhaus; Downy Mildew; The Cocteau Twins; Early RHCP; The Primitives; and so many others. But she also championed the cheesiest albums of our youth, including the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
One night, I was listening to April on KSDT and decided to call in. She proceeded to do “The Alexa Show” for the rest of the set, playing some of the songs we loved at the time, including “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” “Yertle the Turtle,” and “Blister in the Sun.”
So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
After seeing R.E.M. that March 16 night in San Diego, we headed for Riverside, talking the whole time about our plans for spring break — including the possibility of joining another trip organized by Hillel to the Grand Canyon. When I dropped April at her house, I told her to call me if she decided to go and she promised she would.
This was the era of landlines. No answering machines, no texts, no way to reach a person unless they picked up. After a few days passed and I hadn’t heard from anyone, I got annoyed, assuming they’d gone without me.
Then our friend Lisa — April’s BFF — called, and I immediately sensed something was off. “April went on the road trip,” she said. “They got into an accident … April didn’t make it.”
I collapsed in tears, begging Lisa to tell me it was a prank. I even wondered if April was on the other line, three-way-caller-style, listening in. But Lisa insisted it was true, and said I should tell my parents. I kept waiting for her to call back and tell me it was a project for her Psych class or something.
Instead, more details trickled in: the weather had been bad … terrible rain … the car hydroplaned and flipped … April was asleep in the back … no seatbelt … ejected from the vehicle.
The rest of spring break was spent over at Lisa’s house with a small group of people who knew and loved April, all of us trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
When I returned to our dorm room in San Diego a few days after the funeral, all of April’s things had been cleared out. Eerie, empty, devastating … there really aren’t any words to adequately capture what it was like to be back there. But our suite-mates rallied around me, and we bonded in ways none of us could have ever predicted, nor wanted.
Get Up
In the months and years that followed, two words became a sort of mantra in my journals: carpe diem. It probably sounds cliched, but that was the only way I could think to keep April’s memory alive. As in life, her death gave me the courage and confidence I sometimes lacked to pursue things I’d only ever dreamed about, beginning with a trip to Dublin that summer to study at Trinity College, where I was certain I would run into Bono, busking on a street corner. (As it turned out, there was so much more to Ireland than that, and I kept going back, year after year.)
During sophomore year, living in the same suite with most of the same Argo Hall friends, I volunteered at KSDT. In later years, I got a job at Assorted Vinyl, just as April had. I also interviewed bands for The UCSD Guardian, and went to as many live shows as I could squeeze into my schedule.
All of these things inspired me to move to Hollywood after graduation, where I scored a gig with Capitol Records, and then HITS Magazine. I’m not sure I would have done most of it without April in the back of my mind — just like on that trek up Half Dome, any time I thought I can’t keep going, she popped in to say Alexa, you can!
As time went on, the monumental task of adulting took over and I didn’t hear her voice nearly as often. But then I found my old journals and school assignments — the ones that inspired me to start this Substack in the first place — including a chapter in a memoir I wrote junior year, titled “Friends.”
That chapter is entirely about April, and reading it again today has been exactly the medicine I’ve needed.
Truth told, over the past week or two, I’ve been fighting a nasty virus, and my depleted energy levels have had me feeling pretty damn depressed. I even broke down in tears from the exhaustion and confessed to The Husband that I’m struggling and regressing to the point of feeling like a failure — as a wife, as a mom, as a friend, as a writer, as a human.
Of course he tried to console me. But it wasn’t until I sat down to write about R.E.M. and April that I started to feel a bit better, which I guess makes total sense. I mean, about four pages into that “Friends” chapter, I literally wrote: “Whenever I was depressed, it was April who would bring me up again.”
And now, here she is, still doing exactly that.
I may not be up for pogo dancing anytime soon, but if/when that day arrives, I’ll be thinking about April with every jump.
Until then, it’s going to be a whole lot of “Everybody Hurts” on repeat.