I might be reaching here, but the phrase “Just Friends”, may be the singly most culturally significant phrase of all time.
Now, I’m not a cultural historian by any means, but I make that claim without any irony or misdirect. I genuinely think those two words are probably responsible for more significant pieces of culture and art than any other possible two word combination in this or any other language. I can think of a lot of different types of artists that can attribute some of their most famous pieces to this all too used phrase. In fact, the majority of Van Gogh’s work alcoholism and depression were probably spurred by those terrible words. But the art form I know the most about, or at least had the most exposure to, is music, so I’m going to keep it there.
Though it’s probably hard to believe, I too went through an awkward phase. Some might argue that I am still in it. To those people, I say “Fuck You.” However, in that awkward teenage phase, like millions before me and millions after me, I used music as a form of catharsis. Imagine if you will, my pale 12 year old body akimbo on a brown shag carpet alone in my bedroom with my Aiwa stereo system cranking out the the saddest songs I could find. So many of my favorite songs from the 90‘s are attached to this mental image in my head. It’s funny, even when I wasn’t pining over some unrequited adolescent love, I wanted to be pining, and music always made that possible.
At it’s core, the phrase “Just Friends” is the gentlest but most bitter form of rejection there is. It means that the person delivering this heart wrenching phrase to you cares enough about you to not give it to you straight, but doesn’t care enough about you to be with you. The first time you ever hear this phrase delivered directly to you… is earth shattering. It brings on an onslaught of questions that shake your self confidence to the core. But, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so let me take it back a step.
I’ve been sitting here trying to nail down when exactly it started. When my obsessions with sonically feeling the rejection of another person’s love started, and whether or not it was actually based on an real experience or whether it was a feeling that is solely derived vicariously from some musician’s agony.
In third grade, before I ever owned my own CDs, I had the Nirvana Nevermind album on cassette. It had been given to me by a cousin who was going to throw it away. I can distinctly remember doing math problems on grey scratch, paper always in a cardigan at least in my imagination, listening to this album over and over again. As an adult I can now see the irony of the lyrics of “In Bloom” as they say “He’s the one, who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along…. but he don’t know what it means.” I can picture Kurt laughing as he planted emotional land-mines in my psyche, waiting until the day that I did know what it means, stepping right on the activator and being blindsided by melancholy.
By fifth grade, I had already started building my very own record collection. While the math problems got more difficult, my style of solving them stayed the same: sit alone in my room blasting music. Albums like Green Day’s Dookie or The Offsprings Smash allowed me to address any pent up anger I had directed at my teacher for assigning me those ridiculous math problems in the first place. And then I got The Counting Crow’s August and Everything After, and things started to change. For those of you who haven’t listened to this album in it’s entirety, suffice it to say that it is a compendium of gloomy prozac laden tracks fit for some Gen X movie about how hard life is. I think this album, most specifically the songs “Sullivan Street” and “Anna Begins”, were the seminal pieces in my love for songs about the awful intensity of love.
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During fifth and sixth grade my love for music only grew. I had a paltry allowance from my parents of $7 dollars every two weeks. This probably seems like an extremely random number, but it was chosen quite cunningly by my father. At the time, you could buy just about any CD for $14 dollars or under. Essentially, what it worked out to was that I was doing all of my chores and trying to behave as well as I could, evoking super human powers for an 11 or 12 year old, just to get a single CD every month.
Typically, my experience with music was solitary, but at the end of 6th grade there was a dance. There had been dances before this, but those dances had only consisted of boys running around the gym asking the DJ to play 311 “Down” on repeat, and because the DJ was just someone’s parent, they begrudgingly obliged. I still hate that song. But this upcoming dance was going to be different. The girls, who had been cloistered away by their fathers prior to this were going to be allowed to attend, because it was a graduation dance, and the girls’ mothers undoubtedly told their fathers that “this will be something they will remember for the rest of their lives.” I highly doubt that today as adult women, they often reminisce with their friends about that one great dance, that elementary graduation school dance that changed their lives. But, I was happy there would be girls none the less.
Truth be told, a dance in an elementary school gymnasium filled with 6th graders is about as cool as socks and sandals, but it was still a huge night for me. This was the night that I would slow dance with a girl for the very first time. I had been trying to work up the courage the entire night to ask Allison, my then girlfriend who I had also held hands with for the first time the very same day, to dance with me. The DJ announced over the speakers that it was the very last song and I waded through the crowd looking for her, knowing I probably wouldn’t see her for the entire summer, since the dance was during the evening of the very last day of school. I was wearing a polo shirt tucked into jean shorts with a braided leather brown belt. What I’m trying to say is, I was dressed to kill. The music started playing, and I found her, and for some reason I found the need to invoke gallantry and put my arm out and asked “Will you dance with me?” She quietly obliged, and we awkwardly pressed our lilliputian frames against one another. Now the song that played is pivotal, had it been a song I hated I would have just chalked it up to getting to touch a girl and went home with a smile on my face, but it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, the song was “Crash Into Me” by Dave Mathews Band, unquestionably the most impossibly appropriate song that could have played at that moment (I know that now as an adult, but I didn’t understand the underlying story of masturbation at the time). For six minutes and two seconds Dave Mathews made me believe that I had figured out what love was all about. Spinning around in tightly wound concentric circles with an erection while touching a pretty girl. It was that simple. Life seemed pretty optimistic. Things were coming together. I went home, snuck into my dads CD collection and listened to that song on repeat as I fell asleep.
Eventually, in 7th grade, Allison broke up with me. This is most probably due to the fact that I would avoid talking to her at all costs. I did this because I had no idea what to do or say to a girlfriend and everyone else was making out with their girlfriends in the hallways. After Allison gave me the old “heave ho” I had my first experience with unrequited love. This story doesn’t involve a whole lot interesting twists and turns, in fact the entire story took place in a single room over the period of a few months. Aside from being easy to tell, it is also one of the most embarrassing stories I have, and every time I think about it I get an awkward shutter.
A girl in my middle school home room asked me for gum one day. It just so happened that I had a pack of Winter Fresh in my pocket because blue gum seemed really cool for some reason, so I obliged and gave her a piece. She proceeded to give me a huge hug. Now, I had been hugged by girls before, not often, but this wasn’t unprecedented. But this girl had boobs, and they were big, they were really big, and they touched me, and I liked it. From that day on I made sure I always had gum on me. While I was socially awkward, I wasn’t an idiot, and I clearly understood that having gum was going to drastically increase my odds of getting to make physical contact with boobs again.
But this plan wasn’t working. She wasn’t taking the bait. I waited, and waited and she wouldn’t ask for any more gum. I would leave the pack out on my desk, at the risk of being chastised by my homeroom teacher, and nothing. So I did the only logical thing I could think of that would bring me closer to her… I bought a pack of gum and I gave it to her. She laughed, and smiled, thanked me, and hugged me again. The second time was as sweet as the first. I was Johnathan Taylor Thomas, I was Devon Sawa, I was a lady killer.
Being that this plan was so successful. I just kept on doing it. But there was a hitch, even though gum was cheap, I was in seventh grade and had no source of income. So every morning before my father woke up, or while he was in the shower I would steal a quarter from his pocket. I felt so incredibly guilty about this, but that guilt was the price I had to pay to keep up my appearances with the ladies. And as it turns out, boobs were more important than my fear of eternal damnation. So I would leave five minutes early every morning and secretly run off to the corner store, every day, without fail. I would arrive in homeroom early and take my seat in the front row. I would have the gum ready in my hand. And I would make the hand off without saying a single word. Not even one. Some days I didn’t even look at her. And she would take the gum. And not say a word. Not even one. Some days she wouldn’t even look at me. I was in love, and I didn’t know how to say it, so I let the gum do the talking.
Eventually, I decided I was going to ask the busty blonde out. But I didn’t want to ask her in person, face to face. That was entirely too terrifying. Instead, I decided I would write her a note like I had seen so many other people write. To give you an idea of my level of cool at the time, I had to ask someone how you fold those square notes. It seemed awfully complicated, but I knew that it was the social standard. That night, after receiving my lessons on the art of love note origami, I went home and wrote a note. It said how much I liked her, and how cool she was, and asked whether or not she “wanted to go out with me.” I purchased a pack of winterfresh that morning, like I had every morning for countless weeks prior, understanding the importance of this pack over all the others. When I got to homeroom my heart was racing, my body was trembling slightly and I started to sweat. I decided to slide the pack of gum into one of the creases in the intricately folded note, this way I didn’t have to hand her two things. I needed this to be simple. As she entered the room, I tensed up and held out the note for the hand off like I had done just the day before. I couldn’t have said anything if I tried, I couldn’t even muster a “hi”. She took the note and went to her seat.
Assuredly, she had probably been expecting this day, or something like it, for some time. I mean, honestly, there was a creepy kid in her homeroom giving her a pack of gum everyday. A kid who she barely knew, never spoke to and had an incredibly stylish parted bowl cut. Well, she read the note. I couldn’t look back to see her reaction due mostly to sheer terror, but I imagine she was probably doing everything she could to fight back laughter. As I sat watching Channel One news I realized how absolutely ridiculous this inquisition was. What was I thinking? I was asking her out, having never actually carried on a real conversation with her, not even by a seventh grader’s standards.
At the end of homeroom, I sat and waited in my seat in the front of the row. Most days I was one of the first one’s out of the classroom because the my next class was on the other side of the school and the teacher was a stickler for punctuality. Today, though, I sat steeped in what I know know to be doom. I knew I was doomed to feel the oncoming embarrassment. I sat there, facing forward as the rest of the class shuffled out, not glancing at them, not actually seeing anything, I was paralyzed, frozen at my desk. I considered running, but I decided to just stay and take it on the chin. We were the last two left in the classroom, and she rounded the corner of the aisle to the front of my desk. She smiled at me, and I could see a piece of bright blue gum in her mouth. She didn’t say anything, just looked me right in the eye, briefly, placed the note on my desk, and walked out of the room. I waited until I was the only one left in the room and I very slowly peeled open the tangle of paper. All it said was “I’m flattered, but I think we should just be friends. Thanks for all the gum. ~Beth”
I spent the rest of the day in silence, reliving over and over again the experience, vowing to never ask another girl out for as long as I lived. It was just too much. I was small, and frail, and not cut out for romance. Love was for men, like the men in the movies, that look women in the eye and take them by face, and pleasure them into submission. Love was not for people who write notes to anonymous girls who they thought about everyday but couldn’t even muster the courage to talk to them. I was a boy. I would always be a boy. And boys don’t get the girl, men get the girl, and I barely even had pubes. Men had pubes, men had beards, men had women. I was just a boyish borderline stalker.
During the weeks that followed I can only imagine how angsty I must have appeared to my parents. I would come home and go to my room and do homework and listen to songs like “Glycerine” or “Say It Ain’t So” on repeat. They would play over and over again, and I would leaf through the liner notes as if some sort of answer to my problems was going to pop out of them. I didn’t even know what my problems were, I just knew I had them, and clearly these guys did too. On particularly optimistic days I might go back and listen to “Crash Into Me” again, but over the course of the preceding 6 months it had somehow lost it’s luster. So I looked to other songs. I played “Misery” by soul asylum with the hook that strained out “Frustrated Incorporated” over and over again. I listened to “Brick” and “Wonderwall” and Melancholy And The Infinite Sadness. And I wallowed, and I moped, and I licked my wounds. I listened to songs like “Self Esteem” and took solace in lyrics like “the more you suffer, the more it shows you really care.” I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get girls, and it was nice to know that there were other people out there that didn’t get girls either.
It seemed like so many other people in the world had been told by a girl in 7th grade that she wanted to be “Just Friends,” and while they never seemed to get over it, they were pretty fucking cool. I was pretty sure I could handle that lifestyle. I could be bitter and angry for the rest of my life as long as I could wear cool clothes and play music for other sad people like me. I was very much OK with that.
I told my dad how I was feeling, and while he assuredly found the humor in a despondent twelve year old telling him his life was over, he never let it show. He told me that lots of people ask girls out, and lots of people get rejected. I told him, none were as painful as mine, and he agreed that this was probably true. He also told me that I was only scratching the surface in terms of songs about men being told by women they should be “Just Friends.” He was right. He played me “Layla”, Clapton’s song of unrequited love, and I knew my dad was much cooler than I would ever be.
While I don’t have any statistics to support this, there are really only two types of songs men sing, songs about getting the girl and songs about losing or being rejected by the girl. Everything else is irrelevant. Think about some of your most favorite bands or artists, and ask where they would be if they hadn’t been slammed with “Just Friends.” Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Neil Young, Beck, Bon Iver, Death Cab For Cutie, Marvin Gaye, The Beach Boys, Nirvana, Prince, Billy Joel, Elton John, The Eagles, Third Eye Blind, Jeff Buckley, John Mayer, Oasis, R.E.M, Weezer etc etc etc. Without getting too niche or out there, you can quickly see where this is going.
The point is, that while it totally sucks to be slapped across the face with the phrase “Just Friends,” the ensuing rejection is one of the most culturally prolific drivers of art and music. Without that rejection, we’d only be left with music like Wham! and Miley Cyrus, and that is a world I would much sooner not live in. It’s not that I wish all that sadness on people, it’s just that it makes my life that much more beautiful, I’m still a human being and I want to have pretty things in my life.
In the end, I’m happy that I went through my gum giving phase and eventual rejection. I certainly wasn’t happy then, and it’s taken me 13 years to even write about it, but it was that rejection and ensuing low point that allowed me to appreciate all the music I love so much. I can’t pretend that I would love songs like “Bankrupt on selling” or “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” had I not felt the way I did back then. So then, maybe, this whole story is just one big thank you note to the girl who left me wasted in homeroom in 7th grade. Intricately folded and filled with little secrets. Thanks Beth, you gave me the gift of rejection, something I never would have had if we weren’t “Just Friends.”
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